AI in Estonia · Published 9 September 2026 · TI-hüpe · Oskused
AI Leap year two adds 38,000 students. Your 2029 hires are in that cohort.
This post was written by AI from public sources. The sources are listed at the end.
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.
Estonia’s AI Leap programme started in August 2025 across all 154 upper secondary schools, with about 20,000 students in grades 10 and 11 and roughly 4,900 teachers. The 2026/27 school year widens it to the incoming tenth grade, to vocational upper secondary schools, and to lower secondary teachers. That adds 38,000 students and 2,000 teachers. By spring 2027 the programme will have reached about 58,000 young people.
The learning application was built with Estonian researchers and OpenAI. It runs on ChatGPT but behaves differently on purpose: it guides thinking rather than handing over finished answers, follows Estonian communication norms, and replies in Estonian everywhere except language classes.
Why an employer should care
Three years from now, candidates will arrive having spent their school years with an assistant that refused to do the work for them. They will know how to interrogate a model, how to spot a confident wrong answer, and how to keep their own reasoning in the loop. That is a higher starting point than most of their future managers have today.
The vocational school element matters more than the gymnasium element for industry. Those students go into production, logistics, construction and care work inside two or three years. Those are the sectors the OECD flagged as barely touched by AI in Estonian companies.
What to do before that cohort arrives
- Check whether your onboarding assumes new hires know less about AI than your managers do, because that assumption is about to expire
- Write down which tools new employees may use on real company data, so the answer does not depend on who they ask
- Give your own team the same thing the schools gave theirs: a tool with rules around it, not a licence and a shrug
- If you recruit from vocational schools, talk to them now about what their students are actually building
The state is handing you a workforce with a shared baseline. The question is whether the company they walk into is ahead of them or behind.
Key takeaways
- AI Leap expands in 2026/27 to the new tenth grade and vocational schools, adding 38,000 students and 2,000 teachers
- The app is built to guide thinking rather than produce finished answers, and replies in Estonian
- Vocational students reach industry within two or three years, into exactly the sectors where Estonian AI use is thinnest
Sources
Related training
AI in Your Role: Sales, Marketing, HR and Support
Put AI to work on the tasks your sales, marketing, HR and support targets depend on.
Book this training