Visita's certification process, on Core.

Visita is the federation for Sweden's hospitality and tourism industry — the restaurants, hotels, cafés, and conference venues that make up the country's everyday infrastructure for visitors. Among its many responsibilities, Visita certifies the education programs that train the next generation of hospitality professionals. It's consequential work: rigorous criteria, named reviewers, public-facing decisions, hard deadlines, and a small team holding it all to a single standard.

It began in 2021 with around fifteen programs across eleven schools, a thin team, and a setup stitched together from shared Excel files and a shared Teams workspace — and even at that volume, the manual handling was already heavy. Today there are over forty certified programs across roughly fifty schools, around two hundred students taking the certification exam each year, and two hundred industry supervisors — one per student — out in restaurants and hotels assessing students on placement. Yearly recertifications add to the volume on top of new applications. The team didn't grow linearly with the work — and wouldn't have been able to without structures shaped to fit it.

The seat Visita was in

Before, reviewing was carried out by hand. Each application — roughly fifty long-form answers and up to thirty supporting documents, from meeting minutes to steering documents — was downloaded as PDFs, annotated on laptops, and emailed back and forth. Each reviewer worked on their own slice in their own spreadsheet. The process lived in a few people's heads.

Plenty of operationally intensive organisations live with some version of this. What made Visita's version harder to carry was a thin team, a public-facing responsibility, and a budget shape that doesn't really allow for adding people every time the work grows. More people on the same setup would have meant more handoffs across the same patchwork — not more capacity.

What Visita did instead

What Visita did, in practice, was bring us in to build the operating layer their certification work needed. Visita's team runs the work on it; we keep the layer itself running and evolving.

Plenty about Visita didn't change. The people doing the reviewing, the criteria they apply, the standards they hold to — all the same. What's new is the layer they all work on: one data model, one set of rules across the operation.

What the process looks like now

A certification round opens with a deadline. Every eligible school is invited. Each school works through a structured application, attaching supporting documents as they go. The work happens where the answers will be reviewed. No spreadsheet, no email thread, no separate tool holding it together.

When the deadline closes, Core AI does the first read — every answer, every attachment — and surfaces what a reviewer should look at first. None of that is the decision. A reviewer reads it, reads the application, sits with the school, and decides. Reviewer time goes into the parts that need a person, rather than into the mechanical reading.

When a school is certified, the public-facing listing updates without anyone retyping a field. The operational record and the public listing share the same source. Nothing is kept in sync by memory.

Beyond the application

Certification turned out to be the first flow, not the only one. Alongside program certification, Visita runs a student exam — around two hundred students a year — and a practical assessment carried out by industry supervisors paired one-to-one with students. Two hundred industry professionals — chefs, restaurant staff, hotel receptionists, conference hosts — log into the client portal with anonymous codes, grade students against a published rubric, and submit results without ever seeing each other's marks.

The teacher at each school sees the overview, invites supervisors by email, and — when the round closes — clicks one button to generate every student's diploma as a single PDF. Schools, supervisors, and students all sit in the same workspace, even though each group sees only what's theirs.

What changed inside the team

The numbers matter, but the quieter change matters more. Processes that used to live in a few people's heads are now visible to everyone. Reviewers can see what their colleague has done, pick up each other's work, and apply the same standard across every school. New hires can be onboarded into the work itself, not into the unwritten knowledge that used to live around it. When someone is sick or on holiday, the operation doesn't stop with them.

And the rest of Visita has noticed. The data the certification team holds — schools, programs, industry employees, member restaurants — is data other parts of the organisation need too. The conversation has already widened — from certification to what else might run on the same layer.

Beyond Visita

Visita's shape isn't rare. A small team carrying a public-facing responsibility, processes that grew step by step to meet whatever the work needed next, and a point where the work outgrows what hiring can cover — many operations end up there. What Visita did is one path through it, not the only one.

If any of this is familiar, you can read more about the work we do and the Deliveries we ship on Core.