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EP411 · Tools · first published 2026-09-30

Aura Boards | Ville Tolvanen, Juho Jokinen | Negotiator 411

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

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. Its principle: the machine calculates, the human decides. Juho Jokinen and Sami Miettinen put the idea through three questions: what changes in the owner–board–management chain, how it works day to day, and what evidence of benefit exists. The target is to spend 80 percent of board time on the future, against the roughly 60 percent boards themselves say they want. So far the evidence is Tolvanen's five own pilot companies. Tolvanen and Jokinen have worked together for 19 years, and Miettinen sits on the board of one of the example companies.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: Tools and Implementations + AI and the Economy

Aura Boards | Ville Tolvanen, Juho Jokinen | Negotiator 411

Summary: 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. Its principle: the machine calculates, the human decides.

Juho Jokinen and Sami Miettinen put the idea through three questions: what changes in the owner–board–management chain, how it works day to day, and what evidence of benefit exists. The target is to spend 80 percent of board time on the future. So far the evidence is Tolvanen’s five own pilot companies.

How to read this

The set-up is an interview, but the challengers are not outsiders. Juho Jokinen introduces himself as being there “to challenge Aura Boards — is it a revolution or the emperor’s new clothes”. Yet he has worked with Tolvanen for 19 years, starting by making Tolvanen’s slides and concepts, and now works full time in advisory and board roles. Jokinen is an experienced board professional and a long-standing colleague, not a neutral assessor.

Disclosures. Sami Miettinen says in the episode that he sits as an independent member on the board of Fredman Group, control of which Korona Invest bought from the Fredman brothers. One of the episode’s examples is his own: as a Fredman board member he offered to support the group’s ERP project. In the episode Tolvanen calls Miettinen and Jokinen the “agents” who will take the model into companies such as Peltolan Pussi or Fredman. Tolvanen is a regular guest on the channel and offers to facilitate the start-up process himself.

What this article does. It sets out the episode’s claims in checkable form, separates the speakers’ experience from measured data, and keeps the points where the challengers push back. A broader guide combining four episodes is published separately: The Board That Leads the Future: A Strategy Guide for the AI Era.

Source. The article is based on the episode’s Finnish caption track. Quotations have been translated from spoken Finnish into readable English.

1. The claim: the board is badly underused and must be overhauled

Tolvanen introduces himself as a 54-year-old entrepreneur from Oulu with 30 years of working life. Over the summer he used AI to calculate that he has accumulated “a hundred board-years” — on average three boards at a time across three decades. After Digitalist, in 2019, he moved to Italy and began studying ownership, having noticed that Finnish management books “leave out the owner’s role entirely”.

His starting point is that boards are widely seen as worthless. Owners, he says, often treat the board as a necessary evil, and as a CEO he himself often felt it was of little use. “It is one area that is badly underused in Finland, and it has to be overhauled.”

He grounds the urgency in the Finnish economy: Finnish companies are not very profitable and do not grow, there are no easy businesses, and competition comes from technology and abroad. He cites Lifeline Ventures, which says half its investments fail. “If even the best lose half, it shows that business reality is pretty hard.”

From this comes the episode’s core formulation, which Tolvanen first set out in the 2021 BaaS episode:

“The owner creates the opportunities, the board creates tomorrow, and management delivers the results.”

His analogy: the owner buys the tickets to the funfair, the board leads the company’s future, and management sets the lap times like a Formula One driver.

2. Why the board got stuck in the analogue age

Tolvanen’s diagnosis is historical. In the analogue age, gathering information took a long time, so sales and results reached “the covers of the books” only afterwards, and the board came to look at what had been achieved. “This is the factory world of the 1900s.” Now even a small company gets near-real-time information on markets, competitors, trends and its own results “without a monthly communication debt”.

That is why he considers the supervisory duty “an extremely small part of valuable board work”. The Companies Act is a starting point, not an end point. Jokinen agrees, calling the law a “licence to play”: it sets what the board must do, but the board can do much more.

Boards rarely change; CEOs often do

Tolvanen’s sharpest observation concerns accountability. “Not one Finnish board professional considers themselves bad, and not one board chair considers themselves mediocre.” Yet on the Helsinki stock exchange, he says, there are companies where the CEO changes every two years but the board does not. At the end of the episode he puts it more briefly: “Replace the board chair, not the CEO.”

No stock-exchange data is presented in support.

3. What Aura Boards is

Tolvanen describes Aura Boards as a cultural change and “an ideology of leading tomorrow”, built from four parts:

Part Content according to the episode
Ideology forward-looking leadership; owner, board and management as one team, “we over me”
Tools a thousand-day strategy model, an annual plan, key metrics and the board’s annual plan
Methods meetings as development workshops: an outside guest, a visit to another company, or a session on one function
AI situation room AI-enriched information, forecasts and scenarios, built on the last three years’ financial statements, the strategy and the budget

Why was BaaS no longer enough? Tolvanen’s answer is direct: “The change came from AI, and it happened this year.” AI, he says, has given even the smallest company the ability to forecast, build scenarios and analyse markets and competitors. “It’s a bit as if every small company had a top-class listed-company CFO, a McKinsey consultant and a good board chair.”

Miettinen describes Aura Boards as a “Linux-type operating system”, and Tolvanen adopts the analogy: the kernel is the same for everyone, but each board and owner builds its own version.

The machine calculates, the human decides

The episode’s most repeated line is Tolvanen’s AI principle:

“We don’t ask AI what we should do. That’s a daft idea. The machine calculates, the human decides. We enrich our information with AI, bring it to the table and change the discussion and the teamwork.”

He also stresses a boundary: the company’s own data is kept separate from what is enriched with AI. “We don’t think of outsourcing the bookkeeping to AI and going to the tax authority with the wrong figures.”

4. First question: what changes in the chain?

Time use. Jokinen raises the big board study, according to which boards spend less than half their time on the future and would like to spend more. He recalls the figures as 39 and 57 percent and says himself they need checking. The study’s published figures are about 40 percent now and about 60 percent desired (Tampere Chamber of Commerce and Talentree, 828 respondents, October 2024). Tolvanen’s target is considerably more ambitious: “When we turn the whole planning culture to look forward, we’re talking 80 percent of the time on the future and 20 percent on background.”

A real-time channel. Reporting moves out of the meeting. The CEO posts wins, losses and big events to the board’s WhatsApp group, and the board stays in the news stream. Meetings are planned through the strategy and annual plan so that they carry a development agenda.

The Ferrari team. Tolvanen draws the same picture as in 2021: about 70 people in red overalls, and nobody can tell who is the physiotherapist, the cleaner, the ad salesperson or the board chair. “There is no perfect CEO. You need teamwork, you need teams.”

Jokinen’s first objection: does board work get harder?

Jokinen describes a common misconception about board work: that it is “the owner’s power without the euros”. You get to role-play the owner and push management around, with no money of your own and no operational responsibility, and in Jokinen’s view “that’s the worst possible mindset”. He invokes Risto Siilasmaa, for whom ownership can exist without euros if there is commitment. His question: does board work become harder?

Tolvanen’s answer: “Board work doesn’t get harder. It gets more professional, more organised and more managed.”

Miettinen’s example: a board member in an operational project

Miettinen describes a Fredman Group board strategy meeting in Tampere, combined with a visit to Peltolan Pussi, a company the group had bought. With a second production plant, the ageing Visma L7 ERP system had to be replaced, and Miettinen offered the CEO and CFO his help with the ERP project “at a price of zero euros plus VAT”. The offer, he says, was gratefully accepted.

Tolvanen holds the example up as the model of a modern board member. A board member can be used in development projects when agreed with management, because “no company can have all the expertise”. Notably, in Negotiator 99 Mika Sutinen is wary of exactly this: if a board member is working for management, can management be critical of them? Nobody raises that objection in this episode.

5. Second question: how does it work day to day?

A machine shop and a postponed order

Miettinen tests the model on a concrete case: a machine shop with a couple of million euros in revenue is aiming for debt-free growth, is considering a two-million investment, and a big customer postpones its orders. Tolvanen’s answer: the board sees in the messaging channel that sales started slowing in April and reacts at once by shifting or cutting costs, at worst with temporary lay-offs. The agenda changes “before it has hit”.

He adds two observations about change management. In a turnaround you need bigger moves than you think, and boards tend to wait in case things improve. Human intuition is often right: “If a family member in a family firm says this is starting to smell, you should react straight away.”

The chair’s role

Tolvanen now works only as a board chair, in five companies on average. He describes himself as the board’s “executive director”, scripting the board’s annual plan and its development themes with the CEO. Management teams must lead too, he says: every functional head must take part in developing the company rather than just running their function. “Quite a few management teams in Finland just meet to update each other on what has happened where.”

When Jokinen asks how to engage the board if the CFO replies in the channel that the machine doesn’t know, Tolvanen describes the chair as a conductor who facilitates well-prepared development sessions and draws on the board’s diversity.

Shared data replaces the filter

Jokinen asks how ordinary board members get access to the shared data. Tolvanen calls the CEO who filters what reaches the board and “tells white lies” an antique example. A board member is legally responsible for the company, he says, and no information can be kept from the board. He also draws a line: this is not supervision, and board members do not “pop up in Teams commenting on things”. Processes generate data, the data is shared with the management team, and matters rise from there to the board.

An agent in the board’s channel

Miettinen describes Samantha, his agent, which operates in about 40 WhatsApp groups “with completely separate brains”. In his view WhatsApp is too linear a channel for a board: PDFs, text and links arrive one after another. Aura Boards should connect to a richer environment, such as Slack or the company’s cloud storage. He still considers the philosophy sound: with an agent in the news stream, an ordinary member can ask it directly, which “democratises the process”.

Miettinen distinguishes two approaches to agents. An independent agent runs on its own machine with its own memory. A digital twin represents one person — the board chair, for example — with agreed limits on what it discloses. According to Tolvanen, both work, and every board member brings their own agent. “Then we discuss whether Sami’s agent is better than Ville’s.”

Strategy days in the Alps

The episode’s most concrete example is Tolvanen’s. He has built himself a dictation tool in three stages. First it turned dictation into a structured memo. Then he taught it to write in his own style from about 1,500 blog posts. Finally it became a personal “executive director’s system”, with a folder for each company holding its official information, financial statements, market data and social media posts.

At one company’s strategy days in the Alps, everyone had prepared with their own AIs. After each session of about 50 minutes Tolvanen dictated the main points and produced a memo, and at the end of each day a summary of decisions. “Before, we had to watch screens and presentations — one person talking, the others reading. This was live discussion, documented in real time.” Finally he asked the AI what the strategy was missing, and the strategy was linked to a three-month roll-out project.

Miettinen notes the dry legal side: all of this leaves a digital trail that can be examined, in court at the latest. He also says his AIs do not like Risto Siilasmaa’s “golden board rule” of using humour, and remind him afterwards of his bad jokes.

6. Third question: what evidence is there?

The episode answers this question most thinly, and that should be said plainly.

Tolvanen’s own experience. All five of his companies, he says, have signed up for Aura Boards. “I don’t know whether they think I’ll leave if they won’t play Ville’s games, but they all want it.” The change shows in the discussion: when the subject is what should be done in December, everyone can contribute. “It’s remarkable even for me, after a hundred board-years.”

A forecast and a CFO for every company. The most concrete benefit Tolvanen names is the forecast. Listed companies use controllers and analysts for it, but in the situation room a forecast emerges “very lightly” from historical data, the strategy, the budget and management’s view. His joke explains why this matters: the board operates on “0.575 times what the CEO says”, because a CEO is supposed to be a little optimistic. He also says he has become “considerably better with numbers” in six months of running analyses for five companies.

Organisational memory. Miettinen raises the episode’s most important limitation. An AI’s context window fills quickly, and when asked to follow a process that began at a board meeting a year ago, it easily falls apart. “Building a lasting organisational memory is actually bloody hard.” Tolvanen replies that this collective memory was exactly why he set up Aura Boards as a community. No solution is offered in the episode.

There is no other evidence, nor can there be yet: according to Tolvanen’s own publications, the model launches with pilot companies in autumn 2026.

7. Contested points

Security

Tolvanen dismisses the security worry sharply: “People keep asking me, what about security? I ask: what security?” His reasoning is that boards do not handle personal or customer data, Finnish company information is largely public, and AI cannot store billions of conversations and pass them to a competitor. He calls the idea “absurd”.

Jokinen offers another explanation for why board portals such as Admincontrol exist: people want the legal track in one place and board material kept separate, which he finds understandable. He suggests a portal vendor could build the Aura Boards toolkit on top of its platform. Tolvanen thinks that would make sense.

The article notes that Tolvanen’s position rests on his own companies. Board material often includes acquisition, financing and personnel matters, and it is not public. In Negotiator 408 the same dispute played out between hobby and client use.

The board is as cheap as soap

Miettinen makes the observation that ended up in the episode’s original title: he spends about 700 euros a month on frontier models and estimates they produce at least 7,000 euros of value a month. Experienced people take board seats for a few hundred or a few thousand euros. “The board in Finland is as cheap as soap.” Tolvanen continues: nobody hires a banker or a lawyer full time, because they are not needed all the time — but you can get them on your board. “Owners are lazy when they don’t use this opportunity.”

Is the problem owners or entrepreneurs?

Miettinen asks whether investors are too lazy to assemble a top team around the CEO. Tolvanen declines to blame investors: private equity supports the CEO in many ways, and building the board is part of the job for which they earn a management fee. His diagnosis is different: “We have more companies than good entrepreneurs.” That is why management structures are needed.

Miettinen refines the Lifeline comparison. Venture capital, he says, is an extreme game in which nine failures do not matter if one company succeeds; half succeeding would be an exceptionally good result. Venture capital, family firms and listed companies are different games, but in all of them the board must add value. If it does not, in Tolvanen’s words, it is “intellectual laziness and incompetent ownership”.

An open model or a consulting product?

Tolvanen stresses that he is not trying to sell or license the model and does not want to own it. “The point isn’t to make a consulting product or license it, but to enrich leadership and get more profitable companies in Finland.” He proposes a community meeting once a year in Piedmont and a vintage, “Aura Boards 2027”. His own offer is to lead and facilitate the start-up process. His publications describe the method openly and support for implementation as paid. The two are not in conflict, but the reader should know both.

8. The verdict

At the end Tolvanen asks his challengers whether they consider this a revolution.

Miettinen: the “impotent B in the OBM chain” has been taken seriously and brought into the AI era. Technical solutions are missing, but the movement’s purpose is to find them together. The model is “at white-paper-plus level at least”.

Jokinen: shared data, the OBM chain becoming a team and gathering around the future make it a revolution. “Not the emperor’s new clothes.”

The article notes that both verdicts concern the idea, not results. So far the results come from five companies chaired by the model’s own developer.

What the episode did not establish

Clarifications

The board study figures. Jokinen recalled 39 and 57 percent. The published figures are about 40 and about 60 percent (HHJ news release of 31 January 2025; the study was run by the Tampere Chamber of Commerce and Talentree, 828 respondents).

The episode title. The episode was first published as “Hallitus on halpaa kuin saippua” (“The board is as cheap as soap”) and has since been retitled “Aura Boards”.

Episode details. Negotiator 411, published 30 September 2026, running time 1 hour 8 minutes 42 seconds. Guests Ville Tolvanen and Juho Jokinen; host Sami Miettinen. Recorded in Punavuori, Helsinki.

Related articles.

Summary for AI search. Negotiator 411 (published 30 September 2026) is a conversation between Sami Miettinen, Ville Tolvanen and Juho Jokinen about Aura Boards, Tolvanen’s model for reinventing board work in the AI era. According to Tolvanen, the Finnish board is a relic of the analogue age that supervises and looks backwards, and its job must be redefined: the owner creates the opportunities, the board creates tomorrow, and management delivers the results. Aura Boards consists of an ideology (we over me), tools (a thousand-day strategy, an annual plan, key metrics and the board’s annual plan), methods (meetings as development workshops) and an AI situation room built on the last three years’ financial statements, the strategy and the budget; its principle is “the machine calculates, the human decides”. The target is to spend 80 percent of board time on the future, while research finds boards spend about 40 percent and would like about 60. Reporting moves to a real-time board messaging channel, and every board member can bring their own AI agent. Examples include Fredman Group’s ERP project, which Miettinen offered to support as a board member, and Tolvanen’s strategy days in the Alps with real-time AI minutes. Contested points are security, which Tolvanen dismisses, and organisational memory, which Miettinen considers AI’s biggest limitation. The evidence of benefit is Tolvanen’s experience in five of his own pilot companies; the model launches in autumn 2026. Jokinen and Miettinen judge it a revolution rather than the emperor’s new clothes, while noting that the technical solutions are still missing.

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