Saija Ekman

What’s slightly hiding behind my title is my commercial mindset. I spend roughly half of my days in sales and other commercial development — looking more and more beyond Finland.

To me, it’s an invitation to be ambitious about the future before you start talking about technology. Let’s rather start from what kind of business, working life, customer experience, society or even a planet do we want to build here than which models or tools should we choose.

Business and people problems! I’m at my best when organizations feel they are stuck or things are unclear. I tend to get quickly to the heart of what’s going on, see what needs to happen, and help organisations move forward with increased speed and confidence.

What sets me apart is that I’m not starting from technology. My background is in business and management consulting, so I typically ask very different questions than most AI consultants.

Early in my career I was working on a project where we manually calculated the business impact of the work that we had been doing. The client looked at the numbers and said “Keep showing me these kinds of results and it’s easy to find more assignments for you”. Showing results and constant progress sounds obvious but is easy to forget especially in larger transformations.