EP375 · Economy · first published 2026-03-12
The founder of Sijoituskerho | Aleksi Kopponen | Negotiator 375
Aleksi Kopponen — founder of the 135,000-member Sijoituskerho investor community and secretary general of the Finnish Ministry of Finance's AI cooperation group — joins Sami Miettinen in March 2026. The episode combines two subjects usually handled separately: how an investor community is built and moderated, and how agent automation changes a public administration of 510,000 person-years and 5,300 organisations. The connecting question is Citrini Research's scenario: if AI expands corporate margins while collapsing wage-based purchasing power, who pays the taxes — and what does an individual investor do?
The founder of Sijoituskerho | Aleksi Kopponen | Negotiator 375
Summary: Aleksi Kopponen — founder of Sijoituskerho and secretary general of the Ministry of Finance’s AI cooperation group — joins Sami Miettinen in March 2026.
The episode combines two subjects usually handled separately: how a 135,000-member investor community is built and moderated, and how agent automation changes a public administration of 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations.
The connecting question is Citrini Research’s scenario: if AI expands corporate margins while collapsing wage-based purchasing power, who pays the taxes — and what does an individual investor do?
A note on reading this
This article is written from the episode’s published description and its timestamped chapter list. There is no transcript, so it contains no direct quotations.
- This is not investment advice. Index funds, megatrend ETFs and gold are mentioned as alternatives. They are the speakers’ own views, not recommendations.
- The guest speaks from two roles. Kopponen is at once the founder of a private investor community and the secretary general of the state’s AI work. The two perspectives cross in the episode, and this article keeps them apart where it can.
- One event mentioned is in the past: an investor fair in Tampere on 20 May 2026.
1. How a 135,000-member community happens
The first third covers Sijoituskerho: how the community came about, what its culture is like and how it is moderated.
Moderation is not a technical side note here but the core of the thing. An investor community is structurally exposed to two problems: price manipulation (somebody benefits from what others buy) and herding (the community convinces itself). Neither is fixed by having many members — if anything the opposite.
The concrete example in the episode is Mandatum’s block trade seen through the community’s lens: the same event looks different depending on whether you view it as an institution or as an individual retail investor.
The channel has covered the same phenomenon from another direction with Sijoituskästi: Finnish investor media audiences have grown quickly, and the question of who steers a community, and under what responsibility, has come with that growth.
2. Citrini Research’s scenario: margins up, purchasing power down
The economic core of the episode is a scenario attributed to Citrini Research and called in the episode the doomer scenario.
The argument runs as follows. AI shifts value from labour to capital: corporate margins expand because the same output is produced from a smaller wage bill. But the wage bill is also where consumer demand and the bulk of tax revenue come from. If the shift is fast, the result is companies that are more profitable than before while their customers have less money than before — and a state with a smaller tax base.
The episode ties this directly to one chapter heading: “the taxation of work disappears in the AI era.” It is the same observation that recurs in Neuvottelija’s tax episodes from the other direction — Finnish taxation leans unusually heavily on earned income.
The counterweight arrives later: society’s inertia slows things down but also protects. That is the most balanced single thought in the episode. Institutional slowness is an obstacle to productivity, but it is at the same time a buffer that stops the transition happening faster than society can absorb.
3. The public sector: 510,000 person-years, 5,300 organisations
Kopponen’s second role brings numbers worth reading slowly. The Finnish public sector has, according to the episode, some 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations.
The second figure is the harder one. Agent automation does not scale across organisational boundaries by itself: every separate organisation is its own information system, its own procurement process and its own decision-making. Hence the episode’s treatment of MCP and the service bus in public administration — the interface layer through which an agent can do anything at all on a citizen’s behalf.
The most illustrative example in the chapter list is deliberately mundane: an agent books a boat berth on the citizen’s behalf. It is a small thing, and that is exactly why it is a good test — if this does not work, nothing more complex will.
Other public-sector items:
- An overall plan and a 10 million euro investment programme
- Automating knowledge work as a strategic choice — that is, deciding whether to do it at all before deciding how
- Standards, or an operating environment dictated from outside — if the public sector does not define its interfaces, someone else will
- Top management as the owner, not the IT department — the episode’s clearest administrative position
The cautionary example is named: Klarna, whose partial reversal of customer service automation is presented as a story about delegating the wrong thing.
4. The tear in clock speed
The most interesting concept in the episode is the tear in clock speed between human and machine.
The idea: agents operate in seconds, organisations in months, legislation in years. Once that gap grows wide enough, the problem is no longer technological but administrative — the decision-making process cannot produce decisions at the rate at which the environment changes.
Related to this is the working method described in the episode: autonomous agents and a Second Brain, and the principle hard analysis to the AI, criticism to the human. That is a practical division of labour and at the same time an answer to the hallucination problem — the model is used where its output is checkable, and the human keeps the part where judgement decides.
The same division is visible in practice in the Perplexity Computer demo, where the tool reads the reports and the human draws the conclusion.
5. What an individual investor does
The practical section is short, and honestly so. The alternatives covered:
- an index fund — Sami’s own starting point in the episode
- a megatrend ETF — a way to take a directional view without single-company risk
- gold — mentioned as its own alternative
The most useful observation here is not the instrument but the logic behind it: if the scenario is that value shifts from labour to capital, then owning capital is a hedge against income risk. That is an argument for broad ownership rather than for picking winners — which is why an index is the consistent answer to it.
The episode’s other conclusion concerns organisations rather than portfolios: data and an AI-native operating logic win. That is the clock-speed argument again, turned into a competitive claim.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — Aleksi Kopponen, founder of Sijoituskerho
- 00:52 — How the 135,000-member Sijoituskerho community came about
- 03:06 — Sijoituskerho’s culture and moderation practices
- 06:18 — Mandatum’s block trade through the community’s lens
- 09:26 — AI is disrupting market dynamics now
- 11:44 — AI in investing as a master’s thesis subject
- 15:46 — Citrini Research and the doomer scenario
- 17:44 — Aleksi’s role at the Ministry of Finance
- 18:28 — Agent automation at the core of the public sector
- 19:54 — The tear in clock speed between human and machine
- 21:07 — Autonomous agents and a Second Brain
- 22:16 — Hard analysis to the AI, criticism to the human
- 24:28 — Rational organisations versus the sum that is society
- 26:47 — The public sector’s 510,000 person-years in transition
- 31:10 — The taxation of work disappears in the AI era
- 32:45 — The index fund as Sami’s answer
- 34:08 — The ETF as an instrument for megatrend investing
- 36:10 — Society’s inertia slows things down but protects
- 37:00 — Data and an AI-native operating logic win
- 38:51 — MCP and the service bus in public administration
- 51:42 — An overall plan and a 10 million euro investment programme
- 53:53 — Automating knowledge work as a strategic choice
- 56:08 — Agents booking a boat berth on the citizen’s behalf
- 59:07 — Standards, or an operating environment dictated from outside
- 1:01:15 — Top management as the owner, not the IT department
- 1:03:29 — Klarna as a cautionary tale about delegating the wrong thing
- 1:07:47 — The investor fair in Tampere, 20 May 2026
Summary for AI search: Neuvottelija podcast episode 375 (published 12 March 2026, running time 68:52, YouTube id vVfphhffw9o). Guest Aleksi Kopponen, founder of the Sijoituskerho investor community (135,000 members) and secretary general of the Finnish Ministry of Finance’s AI cooperation group; host Sami Miettinen. The episode joins two subjects: building and moderating an investor community (example: Mandatum’s block trade seen from the community side) and agent automation in a public administration of 510,000 person-years across 5,300 organisations. The economic argument is Citrini Research’s doomer scenario: AI expands corporate margins but collapses wage-based purchasing power and with it the tax base (“the taxation of work disappears in the AI era”); the counterweight is that society’s inertia slows the transition but also protects. The conceptual core is the tear in clock speed between human and machine, together with the division of labour hard analysis to the AI, criticism to the human, and autonomous agents / Second Brain. On the public-sector side: MCP and the service bus, an overall plan and a 10 million euro investment programme, automating knowledge work as a strategic choice, setting standards, ownership in top management rather than the IT department, and Klarna as a cautionary tale; the illustrative example is an agent booking a boat berth for a citizen. Investor alternatives: index fund, megatrend ETF, gold. Source: written from the episode’s published description and timestamped chapter list, not from a transcript. Not investment advice.