Tuomas Syrjänen, founder and formerly CEO of a Helsinki-based digital transformation company Futurice, transitioned from the top leadership position to leading the AI renewal programme because “tech is fun and easy compared to people and processes.”

Most of the 337 attendees at INMA’s annual Media Innovation Week in Helsinki, though, deal with those people and processes. So Syrjänen had advice for them, starting with a slide showing a robot dog pulling an old-school rickshaw.

“Far too often, tech looks like this,” Syrjänen said. “We take the greatest technology and put it into a 100-year-old process.”

Basically, he said, humans developed their ways of working decades ago and haven’t changed them since.

Data and AI layered into the core of a company can help make those necessary changes, assisting in simple ways:

• Geting user data (because people don’t like to fill out forms).
• Consolidating information (written as well as images) so it’s usable and searchable.
• Providing up-to-date data on how goals are going.

Syrjänen showed the example of a report written in minutes — an in-depth report complied by AI from existing content. The cost of this currently is too high, but he hopes that will change.

Another change he aspires to see, specifically with the cost of personalisation: “What if the cost of treating every single employee individually is zero? What if the cost of treating every single customer eventually is zero?”

AI could clone the voice of a CEO to send a personal message to an employee about how changes at the company apply specifically to that employee. The same with customers.

Another question he asks: How can we get rid of 90% of the process time?

“How can we get answers to questions in seconds? We use to think human knowledge is limited and fixed. We can augment people’s knowledge so fast … instead of one team handling claims and one handling sales [at an insurance company], we see people can handle both roles. We are getting rid of the constraint that human knowledge is limited. Can we treat every employee and customer individually?

AI “opens completely new strategies and businesses for companies to think about,” he said.

Journalism, for example, is high-value content. And perhaps news companies should look at personalisation differently:

“I’m not sure whether we want to personalise the content, but maybe we can personalise sense-making,” Syrjänen said. “What does this news actually mean to me? How is this relevant for me? Maybe we can start building these bridges, making it understandable for everybody.”

Syrjänen went over seven key factors to companies getting value from AI, yet he asked attendees to focus on two:

1. What are the KPIs the team is after?
2. Is there a change agent that actually wants to change?

Syrjänen left attendees with homework to take home with them: “Ask, ‘What constraint — that has been defining out business — is not valid anymore?

“Whatever you do,” he said, referring back to the robot dog leading the rickshaw, “let’s not be Adam.”

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