A shared digital assistant for the public sector

The shared digital assistant for the public sector is a collaboration between Swedish authorities, municipalities, regions, and industry, coordinated by AI Sweden. The objective is to promote national cooperation on AI for text-based tasks and to create conditions for shared solutions in the public sector.

The ultimate goal is to support public sector employees by freeing up their time, allowing them to focus on more creative and interpersonal tasks. Achieving this requires public sector organizations to pool critical resources and share the effort of gathering the data needed to build truly capable and adaptable solutions.

Shaping a user-friendly AI assistant

Building a prototype for a shared digital assistant is one of the identified tasks to support the use of AI in the public sector. Together with project partners, we explore and identify how the prototype should be designed in order to be easy to use and accessible to all staff members, regardless of technical skills. 

Examples of tasks the assistant could be able to help with:

• Summarizing and analyzing large amounts of text
• Improving and editing texts for clarity and structure
• Create new texts, such as reports, documents, and applications, in accordance with specific templates and guidelines
• Classifying documents and providing decision support in administrative processes
• Developing personalized support to assist citizens 

Annotation lays the foundation for better answers from Svea

During the initiative, participants in the project collectively spent over 5,000 hours annotating training data. In practice, this means rating combinations of questions and answers, data which is now used to train the AI models behind Svea. Read more about this work.

Watch this short video describing how the Knowledge source in Svea works:

What do we face ahead?

Public sector employees in Sweden deal with extensive and varied text-related tasks daily. These are essential to fulfill the sector's mission and provide services to citizens but are also often labor-intensive and time-consuming. At the same time, a significant shortage of staff is expected in the sector due to the aging population and declining labour force.

Alongside the challenge of a shrinking labour force and the increasing needs of an ageing population, there is also a lack of AI skills, computational power, legal requirements and, above all, the lack of Swedish data that reflects the specific needs of the sector. These challenges are too big for individual organisations, and therefore a broad collaboration across the sector with joint initiatives for AI is required.

AI technology is part of the solution

AI technology, especially large-scale language models, has the potential to greatly support this challenge. In a 2019 report, DIGG estimated that AI technology could create a value of SEK 140 billion annually in the public sector (1). Moreover, the report was written before big language models had had time to prove their enormous value.

The potential of large-scale language models is particularly relevant for public sector organizations as much of the data handled in the sector is text-based. Research also shows that using large-scale language models can significantly increase the efficiency and quality of text-based work (2).

At Almedalen 2025, AI Sweden hosted the seminar “For an AI breakthrough in the public sector - a national responsibility on three levels” Watch the recording (in Swedish):

How will the initiative be implemented?

The initiative is being implemented in three phases. Phase 1 was exploratory and focused on needs assessment, technology development, and establishing processes. In Phase 2, large-scale testing of a prototype (Svea) is being conducted, along with training initiatives and evaluation of the fundamental idea. In Phase 3, the goal is to find a long-term model for operation and continued development.

The project has developed a prototype for a digital assistant called Svea, which can already be used within the participating organizations. Svea is a web-based chat interface designed to be model agnostic and based on open source. This solution runs on infrastructure in Sweden.

In addition, the project requires extensive legal expertise, which is done in collaboration with the participating organizations. The aim is to design the system to be usable and adapted to the legal requirements of public organizations.

Change management is also a major part of the initiative. Employees and different levels of operations are engaged in finding new ways of working and using the digital assistant effectively and responsibly.

For more information, contact