OpenEval — Finland's AI-Assisted Search Platform for Development Evaluation Evidence

Finland's Ministry for Foreign Affairs, through its Development Evaluation Unit, worked with IT consultancy CGI to build OpenEval, an AI-assisted web platform for searching and synthesising the ministry's public evaluation reports on development cooperation. Launched on 18 June 2025 by Under-Secretary of State for Development Policy Pasi Hellman, the tool runs on Microsoft Azure AI services — Azure Document Intelligence, Azure AI Search and GPT-4o — and lets users query hundreds of pages of evaluation reports at once, in English or Finnish, to compare findings across countries or types of cooperation.

Development took about nine months from initial proof-of-concept to launch, including three rounds of internal and external testing and feedback before release. Project lead Nea-Mari Heinonen has stressed that the tool is designed to support, not replace, civil servants: "the use and further processing of information always remains a human responsibility." According to CGI, the platform has drawn "significant global interest" from the UN, multilateral development banks, the OECD and EU development-cooperation networks, several of which are reportedly piloting similar approaches, though the Ministry has not published quantified before/after usage metrics.

The Ministry says it will keep developing OpenEval based on user feedback, alongside its companion OpenAid open-data site on Finnish aid flows.

Read more: https://www.openeval.fi

Read the full analysis: https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/harnessing-ai-for-efficient-use-of-evaluation-evidence