Business Finland backs €20m Tampere University–industry AI agent collaboration
Business Finland has approved co-innovation funding for a €20 million project led by Tampere University that aims to address productivity issues in building services engineering by developing AI agents to improve data flow across design, construction, and maintenance.
Business Finland has granted co-innovation funding to a €20 million project focused on productivity challenges in building services engineering, with Tampere University coordinating the research component and a consortium of companies working on real-world deployments.
The initiative, called AI Champion, brings together researchers and companies to examine why building services engineering projects run into delays and cost overruns, and whether “human-like” AI agents can reduce friction in data handoffs across the supply chain.
Business Finland is Finland’s public innovation funding organization. Tampere University is a Finnish research university and will coordinate the project’s research work, with an approximately €5 million research budget.
Business Finland funding targets supply-chain data gaps that slow projects
The project centers on a recurring operational problem in building services engineering: fragmented data, inconsistent formats, and handoffs that do not transfer cleanly between parties.
Piia Sormunen, Associate Professor and project coordinator at Tampere University, says the preparation period for the project lasted 20 months and ties the work to Finland’s wider data economy agenda.
Sormunen says, “The application process and preparation for this unique AI project, which will revolutionise the building services engineering and civil engineering field, took 20 months. I am very pleased that we have secured funding that will enable Tampere University to conduct interdisciplinary research and build an AI hub in Finland. The project is one of the most significant data economy pilot projects of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland”.
Sormunen also points to basic format and workflow issues as a driver of lost time and rework, saying, ”Design documents are usually always in PDF format, which the contractor prints out at the construction site. The big question here is why the data is not transferred electronically from one party to the next, but instead usually causes an information gap between the parties at some point in the process.”
Tampere University plans “GPT laboratory” workflow and 100 AI agents
AI Champion will develop 100 AI agents intended to improve automation and information flow in building services engineering supply chains. The project description frames these as “human-like” agents designed to support processes and operating models once information bottlenecks are identified.
Under the model outlined, when a break in information flow is detected, the information is routed to a GPT laboratory, described as a virtual AI lab at Tampere University. Researchers then combine relevant information and build agents that can support specific process steps.
Sormunen describes the expected outcome as a shift in how work is organized, with some tasks removed and new tasks introduced as workflows become more data-driven.
“Certain work stages will disappear in the processes, but new ones will be created at the same time. More data-driven and AI-controlled processes and services will be developed during the project, improving the competitiveness of the consortium companies both nationally and internationally. In addition, Finnish companies focusing on artificial intelligence, can find new business opportunities in the civil engineering industry”, Sormunen notes.
Consortium includes construction and engineering firms
The project consortium covers multiple stages of the building services engineering lifecycle, from design to maintenance, with an emphasis on testing new agents in real company projects rather than keeping development in a lab environment.
Tampere University will contribute multidisciplinary teams across Built Environment, Management and Business, and Information Technology and Communication Sciences, focusing on construction workflows, information management, and AI agent development in a building services engineering context.
The University of Oulu is contributing product management and business digitalization expertise under Professor Harri Haapasalo, who frames “data flow” as continuous, automatic, and usable in real time without manual workarounds.
Haapasalo says, “The project is extremely important and involves many interesting stages. Our main expectation is that we will be able to achieve genuine data flow. Data flow means more than just transferring data from one system to another. Our expectation is that data will flow continuously, automatically, and in the right format through different processes and systems so that it can be utilised in real time without manual intermediate processing. Once we can link this to the master data of builders, we can start talking about enriched product data and big opportunities for the future”.
The project started at the end of this year and is scheduled to run until June 2028.
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