Artificial intelligence, capital and the decisions that shape our world. Research and conversations from Sami Miettinen, Head of AI at Translink Corporate Finance.
Foreign-policy analyst Henri Vanhanen and Sami Miettinen take a global tour from the US midterms to Russia, Ukraine, China and the struggle for power over artificial intelligence. In Vanhanen's view, Europe's tragedy is that it outsourced its energy to the Russians, its weapons to the Americans and its technology to the Chinese, and is now waking up to a world where the game has in many places already been played. The episode asks why the Iran operation was a strategic mistake for the United States, what Ukraine's drone revolution teaches Finland and how Russia is building up near the Finnish border. On AI, it asks whether Europe has anything to say at the regulation table if the best models end up in an alliance of states and tech giants. Finally the conversation turns to Finland's future, the transformation of work, taxation and who in Finland actually owns the future.
Kari Angeria and Janne Ikola have written a book, Vedenjakaja (The Watershed), that asks what happens to knowledge work as AI takes over a growing share of its tasks. Its boldest claim, as framed in the episode, is that AI makes the mediocre free and in doing so reveals how poorly the goals of human work have been defined in companies. The conversation weighs whether this time really is different from earlier technological upheavals and why the inertia of organisations and the public sector slows change. It also covers delegating to agents, AI managers, the limits of intuition and of language models, and whether companies will be needed at all in the future. Finally the guests give young people concrete career advice and name three new roles in knowledge work.
Etla's chief executive Aki Kangasharju landed in a media storm when his view that Finland's debt brake is too strict was read as support for the line that nothing needs to be cut. In this episode he explains what he actually meant: Finland has drifted into an economic-policy impossibility triangle in which growth reforms cannot be made if they cost the public purse a single cent in the short run. EVA's tax specialist Emmiliina Kujanpää and Sami Miettinen ask what taxpayers get for their money, and Kangasharju concedes that the efficiency of Finland's public sector has barely been researched for some twenty years. The conversation covers the corporate tax cut, wellbeing services counties buying in-house from their own companies, falling learning outcomes against rising spending, the weight of pensions in public expenditure, inheritance tax and the Tax Administration's appeals unit. It closes on reduced VAT rates and the goal of Etla's anniversary book: to bring Finland back to Swedish living standards with more than 50 reforms.
Aslak de Silva is a change leader from Jyväskylä who gets called in when an organisation is in crisis or in flux: CEO of Nordic Business Forum through the pandemic years, CEO of Selfly Store, and now at Maventa. Behind him are more than 15 years of the Korean martial art Han Moo Do, about a hundred full-contact fights and a world title in 2000, from which he has built a leadership philosophy called The Black Belt in Leadership. Sami Miettinen and de Silva discuss how resilience, fitness, rest and staged goals carry over into leadership, why nobody reaches black belt alone, the cross-pressure of owners and boards, Paul Polman's long-term value creation and the loyalty dilemma of the Merita–Nordbanken merger. The episode closes on AI as a leadership coach, the power of stupid questions in the age of agents, and calibrating confidence at the decisive moment.
Ville Tolvanen argues that the Finnish board is a relic of the analogue age and that AI finally makes it possible to reinvent it as a process for leading the future: the owner creates the opportunities, the board creates tomorrow, and management delivers the results. Aura Boards combines an ideology, a thousand-day strategy and annual plan, and an AI situation room built from three sets of financial statements, the strategy and the budget, on the principle that the machine calculates and the human decides. Juho Jokinen and Sami Miettinen test it on three questions: what changes in the owner-board-management chain, how it works day to day, and what evidence exists. The target is 80 percent of board time on the future.
Elias Erämaja, chief economist of Suomen Ekonomit, and Sami Miettinen on why Finland's economy is in surprisingly good shape despite a halved Q2 flash estimate, the cut in the top marginal tax rate from 59 to 52 percent and the cost of a further step to 50, and the Finland–Sweden wealth gap read by mean and by median. The AI section covers business graduates as natural AI users, whether productivity is zero-sum, public-sector productivity and triage, and why an AI tax has no workable definition. Erämaja speaks for an interest group that campaigns for lower marginal taxes.
