That philosophy underpins one of Europe’s most ambitious national experiments in AI-assisted education: A partnership between Tallinn and Sam Altman’s OpenAI to roll out a customized educational artificial intelligence platform across Estonia’s upper secondary schools.
Estonia is an eager AI adopter. According to Eurostat, 23.4 percent of the country’s companies incorporated artificial intelligence in 2025, above the EU average of 20 percent. Tallinn has also not been shy about betting on emerging technologies: it is the birthplace of the once-mighty telecoms app Skype, and home to current tech champion companies like the mobility and food delivery app Bolt and Veriff, the global identity verification service.
Around half of Estonia’s 20,000 upper secondary students are already using the new platform, with the remainder expected to join this summer, in what Kallas described as an effort to rethink teaching. Vocational schools are due to follow during the next academic year.
The program marks a sharp departure from the approach taken elsewhere in Europe, where there’s caution in adopting artificial intelligence and the focus has largely been on detecting AI-assisted cheating.
“That is the wrong fight,” said Kallas, who also teaches at the University of Tartu. She redesigned her own university assignments to integrate the technology, after realizing students were outsourcing traditional coursework to generative AI.
“The challenge is not how to keep AI out,” she said. “The challenge is how to put AI into the learning process so that it accelerates and enhances cognitive growth rather than replacing thinking.”
