AI news for Estonian companies.

Pinned AI in Estonia 28 October 2026 Our first free AI workshop: 466 attendees and a 4.8/5 rating 576 people registered for the free online workshop for project managers on 28 October, and 466 attended. 364 of them gave feedback, and the trainer scored 4.8 out of 5 on average. The next free workshop, for production and quality managers, is on 4 November. Read Pinned AI in Estonia 9 October 2026 Estonia's new business development grant pays up to 500,000 euros, and AI is written into it. Here is who qualifies. A regulation in force since 4 October funds development plans of 100,000 to 500,000 euros, with AI, automation and the sensors and robots that go with them on the eligible list. You need three of eight conditions, an approved plan and a 15% growth target. EIS has not opened applications yet, which makes this the time to prepare. Read Tools 29 October 2026 Google Meet now translates speech live in 63 languages. Latvian, Lithuanian and Finnish made the list. Estonian did not Meet can now translate what people say in a call into spoken audio, between any of 63 languages at once. That helps Estonian companies talking to Finnish, Latvian or Polish partners, but the Estonians in the room still have to speak another language. Read AI in Estonia 28 October 2026 Swedbank cuts about 100 Baltic jobs and asks the question every AI business case skips: what will tokens cost later? Swedbank is reducing its group headcount by nearly 500, about 100 of them in the Baltics, and tests AI in more than 90 applications. Its Estonian head says tokens cheaper than people will mean fewer jobs, but nobody knows what AI vendors will charge once they need to turn a profit. Read Tools 27 October 2026 Agent Skills moves to the Linux Foundation. Instructions you write for one AI tool now have a neutral home Anthropic has handed the Agent Skills format to the Agentic AI Foundation, where engineers from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI will maintain it. More than 70 agent platforms already read the format, so a company can write its procedures once and use them in ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot or Claude. Read AI in Estonia 26 October 2026 Estonia's AI agent register is heading to parliament. Cybernetica, ITL and two regulators want it rewritten The economy ministry wants its draft on registering AI agents in the Riigikogu by early November. The scope has shrunk to one voluntary agent code per private person, and the critics' main objections, weak authentication and unclear liability, are the same questions every company running agents has to answer for itself. Read Tools 25 October 2026 OpenAI switches off GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 in its API on 14 January. Check what your tools run on OpenAI will remove GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini from its API on 14 January 2027, fine-tuned versions included. The suggested replacement, GPT-6 Luna, costs far less but does not support fine-tuning or the Assistants API. Here is how to find out whether your company is affected and what to test before the holidays. Read Tools 24 October 2026 From 1 December, new Copilot Business licences come with pay-as-you-go billing already switched on Microsoft will switch on usage-based billing by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through a reseller from 1 December 2026. The default limit is 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, and Microsoft says the billing cannot be switched off entirely once it is set up. Here is what to settle with your reseller before you buy. Read Tools 23 October 2026 OpenAI's models are coming to Google Cloud, billed against the commitment you already have On 21 October Google Cloud and OpenAI announced that GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna will run in Google Cloud's model garden. For now it is a private preview for selected customers, and Google has not said where in the world the models run. Here is what an Estonian company on Google Cloud should do before signing anything new. Read News 22 October 2026 AI found two decade-old holes in PHP. RIA says tens of thousands of Estonian servers may be exposed. PHP shipped fixes on 21 October for two flaws that let an attacker run code on a web server without logging in. Wiz says it found them with AI models in about a week. Finland, Latvia and the Netherlands took state websites offline. Estonia did not, but every company running WordPress, Drupal or a PHP shop should check its version today. Read Tools 21 October 2026 Gemini Enterprise switches on its new model by default on 27 October. Claude now runs in the EU region too. Google made Gemini 4 Argon generally available in Gemini Enterprise on 13 October, switched off. From 27 October the setting defaults to on. Two days later Google added Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 to the same app, billed per token. Admins have a few days to decide what their staff will see. Read News 20 October 2026 The AI Act has its first harmonised standard. It spells out the quality system high-risk AI builders must run. EN 18286 entered the EU's Official Journal on 14 October. Providers of high-risk AI who follow it are presumed to meet the AI Act's quality management rules. Most companies only use AI and are not affected, but anyone building hiring, credit or exam-scoring software now has a template and about 13 months. Read AI in Estonia 19 October 2026 Estonian hospitals now let AI write up the patient conversation. A doctor still signs every line. Confido, Medicum, Heba, Narva Hospital and Tartu University Hospital all use or are buying AI that records and summarises what doctor and patient say. The rule they share is simple: nothing the AI writes reaches the record until a person has checked it. Read AI in Estonia 18 October 2026 The state is buying a €10 million platform to bring AI training to 100,000 Estonians. What it means for employers On 13 October the State Shared Service Centre opened a €10 million tender, run for the Government Office, for a platform that will broker Eesti.ai workshops, online courses and short lessons to at least 100,000 working-age residents. The contract runs from the end of 2026 to the end of 2029. Read News 16 October 2026 42% of Europe’s smaller firms use AI, mostly as an experiment. Two EU studies show where it stalls. A Eurobarometer survey published on 14 October finds that 42% of European SMEs and mid-caps already use AI or automated management systems, most of them in a limited and experimental way. A same-day JRC analysis shows why the step into core work is slow: the main obstacle is a lack of expertise. Read AI in Estonia 15 October 2026 Telia will cut about 100 jobs in Estonia, and its local chief points to AI Telia plans to remove about 100 of its roughly 1,400 positions in Estonia by the end of the year. Telia Eesti says it hands more routine work to AI, Tele2 says AI takes a bigger role in customer service next year, and Elisa says it sees no reason to cut. Read News 14 October 2026 Half of big-company CEOs say AI drives their productivity. Only 16% can see what it returns. EY asked 1,200 chief executives where last year’s productivity came from. AI topped the list, yet most of them cannot measure what it earns and nearly half say their people are not learning fast enough. Read News 13 October 2026 ChatGPT text in the EU is getting an invisible watermark. It does not do your labelling for you. OpenAI will mark text from ChatGPT and Codex for every EU user to meet the AI Act. The mark does not identify you, nobody outside a small research group can check for it yet, and your own disclosure duties stay exactly where they were. Read AI in Estonia 8 October 2026 The finance ministry is giving the grunt work of election analysis to AI. The design is worth copying. Ahead of the 2027 Riigikogu elections, the Ministry of Finance will let an AI tool split party platforms into promises, sort them and dig up the background. Analysts keep the judgement. Any company that reads long documents for a living should look at how the job was split. Read Tools 7 October 2026 Mistral’s largest model runs on European servers under European law. The weights follow this month. Mistral opened a public preview of Mistral Large 4 on 6 October. It was trained in Europe, is served from Europe, and the weights arrive by the end of October. For an Estonian company that has kept certain data away from AI, the choice just widened. Read News 6 October 2026 An AI agent that goes rogue was given too much freedom. The EU’s cyber chief on where to look. Juhan Lepassaar, who runs the EU Agency for Cybersecurity, told ERR that stories of AI agents escaping human control describe careless setup, not independent machines. His framing hands companies a checklist. Read News 1 October 2026 Three dates from European AI Innovation Month worth your calendar The Commission runs European AI Innovation Month from 14 October to 17 November with the Irish Council Presidency. Most of it is for policy people. Two sessions are worth an operator’s time, and one of them is online. Read AI in Estonia 30 September 2026 Estonia is testing advanced AI on health data without letting the data leave Metrosert and Owkin will assess whether a biomedical AI platform can work on Estonian health-data cohorts inside national infrastructure. The pattern matters well beyond oncology. Read Tools 29 September 2026 Copilot now answers the phone, and reads your whole SharePoint September’s Microsoft release moved Teams Phone Agent, Copilot in SharePoint and Copilot in OneDrive to general availability. Two of those three change what your permissions model has to handle. Read AI in Estonia 25 September 2026 AI agents will not get Estonian ID codes. The person who authorised them stays liable. Estonia dropped the idea of issuing personal identification codes to AI agents. Agents will instead be traceable to the human who authorised them, handled like delegated authority inside a company. Read News 23 September 2026 Two Estonian professors want frontier AI slowed down. Their reason has a practical edge. Meelis Kull of the University of Tartu and Tanel Tammet of TalTech argue that nobody yet knows how to control systems far more capable than people. The incidents behind that argument involve agents reaching into systems they were not asked to touch. Read Guides 18 September 2026 Tartu’s ethics centre listed 12 risks in school AI. The biggest one is not the technology. A working group commissioned by the AI Leap Foundation sorted the risks into educational, social and technical. Its central finding transfers directly to companies: the danger sits in how the tool is used and what you decided to optimise. Read AI in Estonia 16 September 2026 65% of people use AI. 34% of companies do. That gap is your real problem. Statistics Estonia published this year’s figures in September. Household use grew 1.4 times, enterprise use 1.5 times. Two-thirds of adults now use AI while a third of companies do, which tells you where the work is happening. Read Guides 11 September 2026 Four places you now have to say that AI did it A working checklist for the disclosure rules that took effect in August. Most of it comes down to four touchpoints a normal company already has, and one judgement call worth writing down. Read AI in Estonia 9 September 2026 AI Leap year two adds 38,000 students. Your 2029 hires are in that cohort. The programme widens to the new tenth grade and to vocational schools, bringing in 38,000 more students and 2,000 more teachers. By spring 2027 it will have reached roughly 58,000 young people. Read Tools 4 September 2026 34 new models in one month, and a 100x gap between the cheapest and the dearest September brought 34 model releases from 14 labs. The cheapest runs at ten cents per million input tokens, the frontier tier at ten euros. Picking the right one is now a cost decision, not a status one. Read News 2 September 2026 The AI Act’s disclosure rules took effect. The high-risk deadline did not. Article 50 transparency duties have applied since 2 August 2026. The Annex III high-risk deadline moved to December 2027. Most companies are caught by the first one and spent the year preparing for the second. Read AI in Estonia 27 August 2026 Estonian companies can get AI projects part-funded. Here is what is on offer Two EIS measures cover part of the cost of mapping and building AI, up to 10,000 and 35,000 euros. The conditions decide whether applying is worth it. Read News 19 August 2026 Two thirds of service teams now run AI agents. That number moved fast Salesforce is reported to put AI agent adoption in service organisations at 66 percent, up from 39 percent a year earlier. A jump that size changes what customers expect. Read AI in Estonia 22 July 2026 What the Eesti.ai programme is actually asking of companies The national goal is to double the value of work in Estonia by 2035. Read past the headline and it is a target that lands on individual companies. Read News 8 July 2026 How long before an AI deployment pays for itself Reported benchmarks put the median at four to eight months from go-live. The number matters less than what makes some projects land at the fast end. Read AI in Estonia 10 June 2026 Estonia uses AI more than the EU average, and mostly in the wrong places The OECD finds adoption running ahead of the EU average but concentrated in admin and support work, with little of it reaching production or core operations. Read News 27 May 2026 A health insurer cut service costs by 60 percent. The interesting part is how NIB Health Insurance is reported to have saved 22 million dollars with AI-driven digital assistants. The reported 15 percent drop in calls explains more than the headline figure. Read AI in Estonia 15 April 2026 The Kratt action plan, read from a company’s point of view Estonia’s AI and Data Action Plan runs to the end of 2026. Most of it is aimed at the state, but three parts of it change the ground under private companies. Read