Netum Group Plc | Press release | 22 September 2026 at 10:00 a.m. EEST

AI creates school timetables now – Netum launches AI-lukkari

Finnish IT services company Netum has launched AI-lukkari, an AI-powered solution for school timetable planning. Developed in collaboration with the University of Oulu, the solution helps educational institutions automate one of the most demanding planning tasks in education: coordinating schedules for students, teachers, courses and facilities. Now, all educational institutions across Finland have the opportunity to utilise the results of this development work.

Creating a school timetable is a complex optimisation task for educational institutions. Moving a single course can affect the schedules of numerous other courses, students, teachers and facilities. The larger the institution, the harder it is to manage the whole picture.

AI-lukkari helps institutions manage this complexity by harnessing data and artificial intelligence.

”When generating a timetable, the solution takes into account constraints related to courses, students, teachers and facilities. This allows some of the most time-consuming parts of the planning process to be automated, freeing experts’ time for tasks that require human judgement,” states Liisa Rusanen, Director at Netum.

AI-lukkari originated from the LUKA project, a collaboration between Netum and the University of Oulu. In a pilot project carried out in 2025, the partners developed a data-driven optimisation solution for AI-assisted timetable planning. The results showed that many manual steps in timetable planning can be significantly automated.

The collaboration has continued from the pilot phase into production use. The launch of the solution in production at the University of Oulu was announced in early 2026. The development work has helped streamline timetable planning, harmonise the data used in the planning process and strengthen expertise in using AI. In the future, timetable planning will become significantly more efficient as AI-powered automation replaces months of manual work.

The same solution is now available to other educational institutions as well.

AI does not replace the planner – it helps solve the bigger picture

According to Liisa Rusanen, the most interesting thing about AI-lukkari is how artificial intelligence can be harnessed to solve a concrete problem that requires a lot of work.

"We have been a digitalisation partner in the education sector for more than a decade and are well acquainted with the everyday life of educational institutions. Planning timetables is a good example of a task where artificial intelligence is really useful: there are many variables to deal with and even more options", Rusanen says.

"The goal is not to make people redundant, but to free up time for other work. When artificial intelligence handles computationally heavy optimisation, the expert has more time to assess the big picture and make decisions. AI-lukkari is a concrete example of what kind of benefits artificial intelligence can bring to the everyday life of education at its best", she continues.

AI-lukkari is one example of how the use of AI is moving from experimentation into the everyday work of organisations. In the education sector, there is potential beyond timetable planning, for example, in making better use of data, automating administrative processes and supporting learning.

“AI-lukkari is just the beginning of the ways AI will reshape the education sector in the future”, Rusanen concludes.

Learn more about AI-lukkari:
www.netum.fi/ai-lukkari (in Finnish)

Read more about the development of AI-lukkari in collaboration with the University of Oulu:
Netum and the University of Oulu's customer success story

For further information, please contact:

Netum Products
Liisa Rusanen, Director
+358 40 738 9238
liisa.rusanen@netum.fi

Netum Group Plc
Repe Harmanen, CEO
+358 400 467 717
repe.harmanen@netum.fi

Netum Group Plc

Netum is an IT service partner that builds a functional and secure digital society. We help our customers develop their digital business by designing and implementing sustainable digital solutions tailored to their needs – wisely and responsibly. Netum employs approximately 310 people, and the Group's revenue in 2025 was EUR 38 million. Netum Group Plc's shares are listed on Nasdaq Helsinki First North (NETUM).www.netum.fi