Think first

0:36Petri KokkoHello everyone, and welcome to the first episode of You're On Mute. We're here together with Nicklas a former colleague from Google, and we have been discussing a lot lately where the world is heading and what we are seeing. And we get these questions all the time as well, is that so how should we be preparing? What- how should board work look like? How should education look like? How do you use these tools? And this is exactly the reason why we are here right now to discuss with you what we can do. Great to see you, Nicklas.

1:13Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd great to be here-

1:14Petri KokkoHow was your morning?

1:14Nicklas Berild LundbladPetri. My morning was really good. I'm on an island in the archipelago, and it's drizzling, but it's a beautiful autumn morning, so I really enjoyed it.

1:25Petri KokkoWhat did AI do to you this morning?

1:27Nicklas Berild LundbladDo for me, I hope.

1:30Petri KokkoWith you

1:30Nicklas Berild LundbladWhat it did, what it did do to me, I don't know. But no, so what it did for me this morning is several things, right? One is that I nowadays read the morning news through an, a news aggregator that I built myself. So the first thing I do in the morning, I go to this news aggregator. I check what the news is, what the top news is in the categories I care about, AI, politics, et cetera.

1:52Nicklas Berild LundbladSo that's primarily how I encountered it this morning. And then I, and I also had it remind me what we had agreed we would discuss on this podcast. So there you go. which it which it happily did because it has access to my calendar and email and meeting notes and so on. so I would say that's my morning AI. What about yours?

2:15Petri KokkoWell, my morning AI routine has become to check out what it looked into my inbox and then decides on where, what to do a reply to what not to reply to, and also write drafts. I have not let it answer directly itself. So I use it as an assistant, as it should be, but it writes for me replies, and then I look through them and may might do some small changes, and then I'm ready to go.

2:47Petri KokkoI also used as a news aggregator. work- been working in the, in the defense industry, so I have no clue of defense, so it's been amazing for us, for me to be able to have my own news aggregator to look at what's going on in that field. so those are those things that really... Plus, I have to say that I used AI to optimize this beautiful setup that I have here with-

3:12Nicklas Berild LundbladIt

3:12Petri KokkoWith lights and so on

3:12Nicklas Berild LundbladIt is quite stunning. It's quite stunning. Very well done.

3:16Petri KokkoI did, I did a few alterations, and it said, Oh, you know, you should use more light here and more light there, and don't let light come in through the window, and so on. again, it shows what all kind of stuff you can, you can do with this.

3:28Nicklas Berild LundbladI should probably learn from that. I feel worried about my background now. but I want to catch something you said that I think is really interesting. it's the email thing because I've started to do the same. And I, I've started to sort of ask myself a question, which is I wonder how much longer we will actually have email inboxes for humans, and when email inboxes should be for agents instead. Because the idea of looking into your email inbox with all of the noise and all of the different things that come in, some important, some not, and for me to take on that filtering cost and that filtering burden makes absolutely no sense.

4:06Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd and I really do believe, I mean, I hear you about only having a draft because you don't want it to send yet, but, I mean, for how much longer does it have to draft really well for you to say, Well, you know, I actually am quite fine with it responding for me as well? My prediction is this. I'll go out on a limb. I'll say in five years I will not check my inbox anymore. I won't open Gmail anymore.

4:32Nicklas Berild LundbladI will be doing all of my correspondence, whether it's, you know, email or any other correspondence that I do, through an agent. And I'm so looking forward to it. I think we might be closer to the end of email than we realize, and what a glorious thing that would be.

4:47Petri KokkoThat's a good prediction. And I have to say that also now I still go into my inbox then to glance through that was it correct. And until now the only mistakes that I have found was that it had obviously access to my calendar too, and if I, if I put into calendar that there's an event that takes a full day, it thinks that day is free. so if someone comes in and said, Oh, could we have lunch during that day?

5:16Petri KokkoIt will tell, Oh, yeah, you have-- you don't have anything in, on that day, because I had put it into the event. So you need what I learned is that even if it's a day, a full day event, you need to block the full day in order for it to understand that yes you are actually busy. But I, I'm completely with you. I actually heard an interesting statistic a few days ago that said that already today two-thirds of internet traffic would be done by bots.

5:46Nicklas Berild LundbladYeah. That makes total sense to me.

5:48Petri KokkoSo if you have a website today, who are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for humans, or are you optimizing for bots?

5:56Nicklas Berild LundbladOh, I would-

5:56Petri KokkoAnd then if you go to Google's

5:57Nicklas Berild LundbladI would, I would certainly optimize for bots. Yes.

5:59Petri KokkoYeah. But if you go to Google's SEO rules they say, oh, you should or, you know, you should really optimize it for the humans. But if it's only a third of the traffic- I think that's a fascinating development.

6:11Nicklas Berild LundbladIt is. And I, and I think there's more to that that's really interesting to dig into as well because as the web transitions into an agent web rather than a human web there is so much else that should happen as well with services. So if you're a service today and you don't have an API that agents can interact with or like a MCP server or something like that, I think that's a conscious choice because you're afraid of being out-competed by the agents or you're afraid of becoming just a resource under the agent layer.

6:40Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd I don't think that works because I think we, I know I want these services to just connect. The reason I, for example, have started to use Notion a lot more is that Notion has a really good set of agent integrations. So you know, I have- I do meeting transcripts, I do different kinds of updates, and Notion essentially works as an extended memory for all of the projects that I'm involved with. And my agents then just consult Notion.

7:08Nicklas Berild LundbladThey update it. There's a work journal for every single project, so I can go in, see what has been done where. and that kind of structure really depends on the idea that we have services that are agent first. And I think if you're not agent first because you're a little bit afraid that the agents will come between you and the customer, you probably need to find another way to make sure the customers love what you're doing.

7:34Petri KokkoI love it. this really reminds me all the time is that well, I can tell our viewers now that also that you worked for DeepMind, and one of the DeepMind engineers once told me that, Petri, don't think of AI as an Einstein. Think of it as what would you do if you would have 100 assistants. And that has really stuck with me in the sense that, yes, if I would have those assistants, will I let them run immediately free?

8:02Petri KokkoNo. I would tell them exact- you need to tell them, You do this, and that, and when you've done this, you come and tell, show me what you've done. And then you correct and then say, Oh, can you do this, and that? And I think that, let's call it a metaphor I think is, has been stuck with me, and that's the way I've been looking into most of the stuff I'm doing is that. So what could my 100 assistants do for me while I'm you know raking leaves in the garden?

8:34Nicklas Berild LundbladYes. and reading and doing all those things that sort of make us smarter. But... And I think it's interesting because I agree with that although I think there's a, there's a twist to it, which is that if you had 100 assistants, you would appoint one of them head assistant. And then you would say to that person, Please take care of the rest so you can organize them. And that's essentially orchestration, right? Agent orchestration. and I think we will see these orchestration patterns emerge that are super interesting, and people will adopt different orchestration patterns.

9:03Nicklas Berild LundbladYou can have a main agent that you interact with and then delegates to sub-agents. You can have a main agent you interact with sub-agents, and then you can have a guy who checks it. Currently, you're the guy who checks the email inbox to see nothing was missed. You could have an agent do that. Or you're the one who reads the draft. But if you have one person drafting, one reading, and a third saying, Yeah, you're right.

9:23Nicklas Berild LundbladWe should change this, then you start to sort of build these little teams. And I know Ethan Mollick, who writes about this beautifully and is a really smart professor of management, he said that the key skill in the future for AI is not going to be coding or computer science, it's going to be management. You have to be really good at management. How do you delegate? What do you not delegate? How do you set up teams?

9:44Nicklas Berild LundbladHow do you make sure teams have clear goals? The kinds of things that you've been a manager for a long time, or the kinds of things that we, that we learned as managers are now actually the core skills for interacting with AI, which is kind of fascinating.

9:57Petri KokkoIt is. And if you take that argument or that thinking even further, traditionally in companies, even your salary bands have been more or less defined by how big is your team. And then the smartest one has realized that, oh, you know, I should, I should get the bigger team, and I get paid better and higher- and so on. I might higher in, so to say, in the, in the hierarchy of these companies. So what if... And we will move into these hybrid teams.

10:28Petri KokkoI will have those 100 assistants on my hybrid team, and I might have two other people there doing things. is that a big team or a small team going forward? And the question is that maybe we should be really looking into that how can we build those hybrid teams in the future.

10:48Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd measure on outcomes.

10:49Petri KokkoBy the way, leadership will change also completely.

10:50Nicklas Berild LundbladOh, it will. it certainly will. I mean, and measure on outcomes, I think, is the thing you have to do, and not look at, for example, you know, how many people do you have in your team, which I agree traditionally has been the case. Because now you know, a single person with a really good agent setup with excellent data can outproduce a 200, 300, 400 person team. And that's also why we're seeing the restructuring in many of the tech companies now where, you know- the vast restructuring that Microsoft is doing, et cetera.

11:19Nicklas Berild LundbladSo coming back to this notion of what we do, I think one of the core things that we need to learn is that we need to learn how to think about this in a more traditional way.

11:32Petri KokkoMeaning?

11:34Nicklas Berild LundbladI mean

11:34Petri KokkoThinking a traditional way? What do you mean? Can you elaborate?

11:36Nicklas Berild LundbladSo what I... Yeah, no, what I mean, we need to think about this in a way where we sort of go back to the basics- and ask what do we do? What are the kinds of things that we produce? What are the kinds of services that we offer, for example? So that's largely what I was referring to.

11:55Petri KokkoI have a question for you, Nicklas. Is AI a transformational technology, like for example digital was, or is it just a way to make us as individuals much more efficient?

12:13Nicklas Berild LundbladIt's a good question because when we say AI, we typically take all of the different technologies that fall under that particular term, and we treat them the same. And I think there is some AI that is really good at sorting, for example. so you have spam, for example. Spam filters were a kind of AI, and they were really good at what they were doing. But if you think about AI as extended cognition, as us being able to think more differently, deeper, and you know, across more domains, then certainly it is transformational in a sense.

12:43Nicklas Berild LundbladFor 'Cause to me, the technology that we are now building is adding cognition to the world, adding thinking to the world, and I think- that's something that's radically different from adding a new way of connecting or communicating or storing information. So you could, you could almost phrase this in saying that we're sort of, we have understood ourselves for the metaphor of the information society for a long time. Now, if you transition that into the new metaphor, the intelligence society, you suddenly realize that there's a huge difference between information and Intelligence is action.

13:16Nicklas Berild LundbladIntelligence is in different ways sort of reframing the world. And information is capturing the world and trying to describe or represent it in different ways. so I would, I would probably fall on the side of transformational when you look at the entire technological architecture we're building, because we're building something in the world that can think with us, and sometimes without us. What do you think?

13:40Petri KokkoThe reason why I'm asking this a little bit also is that obviously, you know, it's like we both remember the times when, so to say, in the, in the beginning of digital . and then suddenly we started seeing e-commerce, we started seeing digital banks that had no branches any longer, and so on and so forth. so it more or less built complete new ways of new type of enterprises, new type of companies, new type new ways of serving your clients.

14:14Petri KokkoAnd I don't know if we've seen an AI bank yet. We might have seen some insurance companies who can really automate the claims process and so on. but so the, so it really goes back to yes, I, I'm completely with you that it will, it's, and it's already transforming the way I work, and it transforming the way individuals are working. But is it is it transforming companies and the way companies work, and, or is it just so that we are so early in the development that we haven't- seen it yet?

14:50Nicklas Berild LundbladYeah, no, I think, I mean, if you look at where it

14:52Petri KokkoAnd the reason also I'm asking this a little is that I see that those companies that in the early days of digital did not jump on the bandwagon, they got left behind. we look at some of those department stores who said, Oh, we will be waiting until, you know, I don't know what they were waiting for. They're still today waiting for it. and the Amazons and, of this world have passed them. and I see here the real, the same risk is that if this is truly transformational, if you don't jump on the bandwagon today, you'll be you know, you will be, not be able to catch the train any longer.

15:29Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd I actually think it's, I do think that it's the case. I think you're right. And I think the problem here is also that it's in a different way you will be left behind. Because in, if you look at the information society, if you look at the digital divide as we used to talk about, the digital divide you could bridge by connecting more and more people, or connecting companies, or connecting employees, and making sure they had access to the internet, and then starting to rethink the business model.

15:54Nicklas Berild LundbladSo connection was the thing that you would do in order to bridge the digital divide. But if you now look at the kind of divide that we're building, it's a cognitive divide. It's sort of a divide that is based on how you learn. And learning is premised on organizing your data in the right way, asking the right kinds of questions, following up, compounding, making sure that every new learning is integrated into a new world model. And those things, they compound much faster.

16:20Nicklas Berild LundbladIt's not just a question of giving somebody access to AI. You have to set up this learning infrastructure, and once you do that, it accelerates. So if you're left behind, you're left behind not a linear evolution of a field, but you're left behind somebody who is slowly going into an exponential learning curve. And that is, that is means that the cognitive divide is unlikely to just become smaller by its own. It's rather likely to grow. So between the companies that do or do not organize themselves for learning through AI or adapting through AI will probably be left even further behind, and their sort of gap will be growing if you compare to digital. So I think they're potentially in a worse situation.

17:07Petri KokkoIt's interesting you say about the exponential development. you also remember our ex-colleague Ray Kurzweil, who always argued his argument was clearly that yes, all these developments are exponential. And the interesting thing about exponential developments are obviously that in the beginning it looks like nothing happens. Because the beginning is, it looks slow, and then when the hockey stick hits, then that's when it's, so to say, late. Are we today in that phase now when... have we hit the hockey stick or yet, or are we still in the phase that it development looks slow?

17:46Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd there's a new term being thrown around in tech circles where they say we're in the foothills of the singularity. So the foothills is sort of this space between the ground and the mountain, the exponential. So this notion of being in the foothills of the singularity, I think is not completely wrong. I mean, I think singularity is a really... It's an interesting concept, and it can be contested because you can say there's been no technology in the history of mankind that has not turned out to be an S curve.

18:12Nicklas Berild LundbladSo whatever we said was an exponential curve, electrification or computers or internet, et cetera, ultimately always turned out to flatten like this like an S curve, not an exponential curve. Now, the argument against that, though, from the people who believe in the singularity is really interesting because what they will say is that, yes, all individual technologies describe an S curve, but AI allows you to stack them on each other. So every time a technology flattens, a new technology will come along, and that will build the exponential over time.

18:42Nicklas Berild LundbladSo compounding these S curves is what gives you the exponential. And so I mean, the jury's out on this one. You can or cannot believe in the singularity if you want to. But I think- one of the things that we should recognize is that the evolution, the development is now incredibly fast. we also seem to be at the cusp of this interesting moment where AI codes AI in a way that we don't quite understand, but we also believe will greatly will greatly improve the speed with which AI develops.

19:13Nicklas Berild LundbladAnthropic recently released a statement where they said that, you know, around 90% of the improvements that we're doing right now in some of our models are actually done by models. checked by humans, they sort of added. It's like they're checked by humans. but that-

19:28Petri KokkoIt was an assistant. It wasn't me.

19:30Nicklas Berild LundbladYes. but that sort of suggests, that suggests that we might be heading into the exponential to your point because I mean, I, and I do think this is interesting because when you can start to run different processes in computational speed, so you can run them at the speed of a computer, and you're no longer held back by biological speed, the speed of human beings, then things will go faster almost by default. there will be still some biological bottlenecks, but we're removing more and more of them across at least the field of coding.

20:06Petri KokkoIf I, if I... A little bit another, other question is like I think one of the advantages both you and I have right now is that we control, so to say, our own calendars, and we have the possibility to test, learn, take time to develop different things and so on. if I see the companies that I work together with on boards and also through different other means, they are completely overwhelmed and overheated by information, by tasks.

20:39Petri KokkoThen they're saying, Oh, you know, we're cutting now people, but they don't know how to, how to you know, take advantage of these tools and so on. where do you think they should start? What would What should they use their one free hour a day of in order to get over this how would I put it completely overwhelmed world as it seems like now in many corporations?

21:09Nicklas Berild LundbladWell and it's such a good picture of reality as well because I do think that a lot of people feel overwhelmed. they feel they're working more than ever, and this notion that AI is taking their jobs, they're like, Yes, please, take it. Because it's like there's so much to do, right? but I but I think that if you, if

21:25Petri KokkoBy the way, that you said that and partly as a little bit of a joke, but it interests me. I just saw in a survey where half of people in businesses did not dare to say what tools they are using because they're afraid of their jobs. So if someone sees that they're using a tool and that makes them more efficient, the question is, Oh, am I still needed? Half of the people- which I thought was scary.

21:53Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd it's crazy.

21:54Petri KokkoSo they'd rather, they'd rather keep it to themselves and say, Oh, yeah, I'm really busy.

21:58Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd that's, and that's crazy because what we really need are people who can use the tools and use them really well. But to your question then, what do you do if you have an hour a day and you want to develop and you want to grow and you want to understand how to deal with the information that is overwhelming you? I think the answer is surprisingly simple and slightly cheeky. It is you should ask the AI to teach you how to deal with information overload.

22:21Nicklas Berild LundbladGive it, you know, ask it to give you three tips a day and walk you through how to become more effective, and it will. At this point, we're in this unique situation where we have a technology that can teach you how to use it. And that's never been the case before. And so if you're really dead set on trying to figure out how things work, you can just start to ask it. That's when I realized that, which was when I was sort of playing around with chatbots, et cetera, that I can ask this thing to teach me it sort of made for a minor revolution in the way that I use technology.

22:51Nicklas Berild LundbladSo I started coding. It taught me to use open source repos. I started to build my own skills, was the thing I started with, which is a simple way of telling the AI to do the thing it's doing in the same way all the time. And then I went into using Claude code, and every time I ran into something that I didn't understand, I asked it to explain it to me as if I was a 12-year-old, and it happily did.

23:14Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd I would, I would I would, I would sort of constantly have the ability to learn more and more and more. my challenge now is that I need the AI to tell me where my ignorance is keeping me back because I think I learned something. I think I know how to do this thing, and so I do it the same way. And what I've learned to do is that I've learned to ask the AI, improve on my ideas and improve on my methods.

23:40Nicklas Berild LundbladTell me what I could be doing to do this more effectively. Which means that I don't get stuck in thinking that I'm really good at this, which is like a very human error. I did that in the beginning. I was like, Oh, I'm really good at this and I'm doing this in the right et cetera, et cetera. And then when I ask the AI to sort of review what I had been doing, the project that I'd been working on, and give me a few insights into where I could be doing things more effectively it was slightly embarrassing because I was I was, yeah, using wrong technology.

24:05Nicklas Berild LundbladI was using wrong hosting. Too much of this, too little of that. Models that were much too expensive for what I was trying to do. And when we optimized it and my could continue to learn- the result was awesome. so this sort of two things: ask the technology and constantly be on guard against thinking that you know enough. I think those are the kinds of things I would advise. What would you advise?

24:32Petri KokkoWell, yeah, I like that thing. As I wrote my first skills some time ago, and I also was thinking, So where do I start? And I started by saying, Tell me how to how to do this. so we're coming back to that. the other thing there I think also is fascinating really about asking those questions in order to learn. I have the chance to help the business school here in Helsinki around these topics. And one of the things that I always tend to ask them is that, so if I don't understand something, how many questions do I dare to ask the professor?

25:11Petri KokkoProbably two. And if I still don't understand, I, I'll just say, Oh, okay. I and then I'll go home and trying to figure that out or I ask my friends. what's wonderful with these tools is that as you said, you know, you can, you can, you can continuously ask, So sorry, I still didn't understand. Can you please make this a more simple ways? or as you, as you said, I wouldn't dare saying that, just explain to me like I'm 12 year old because I, I'm sure that those 12-year-olds-

25:41Nicklas Berild LundbladNo, they're smarter than we are

25:42Petri KokkoSmarter than

25:42Nicklas Berild LundbladFor sure. yeah

25:43Petri KokkoHow to use these-

25:44Nicklas Berild LundbladI completely agree with that

25:45Petri KokkoThese tools

25:45Nicklas Berild LundbladThey're very smart.

25:46Petri KokkoBut I completely agree with you. I think that's one of those things that where you can really find amazing advantages of... and also as you said what am I, what am I missing? I wrote a keynote a few days ago, and then one of the things I asked also was that tell me what areas of this keynote are dated. And it said, and it said, Oh yeah, you know, you, these examples are quite old. You know, you should, you should probably use this.

26:16Petri KokkoI, I'll find you a better example that is closer to today and so on. And I thought that was really good also. and it also added, said so you know, just don't talk about, you know in a way that using it as a chatbot or like a, like a instead of a of a, of a Google Search box, but really about how do you take that into agents and so on. And I I thought it was it gave me good insights again in what I was missing.

26:46Petri KokkoAnd I say, Oh yeah, you know, you, you're right. I am missing those things. so I think you know, keeping you alert all the, all the time also and say, you know, what am, what are areas did I not think I think are absolutely key also.

27:00Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd I think the really good part of that, what you're describing, is that you are also starting with your own thinking, which means that you're not handing over the thinking from the get-go to the machine. And I think we should also talk about the anti-patterns. When I talk to people about AI, one of the things I really try to say, there are ways in which you should not use it. So I there are a few simple tips that I always come back to.

27:21Nicklas Berild LundbladOne is use more than one AI. Ask it to take the opposing stances. So one is pro something, one is con something. That's a really good way to make sure that you are in the driver's seat. It's a judgment-centric setup. The other thing that I think is really important is start with human thinking. I'm allergic to this notion that the AI can give you a draft and then you can expand on it. That's exactly the wrong way around.

27:44Nicklas Berild LundbladI sit down now, I write longhand when I do a talk or an, you know, an essay or something. I write longhand for a couple of hours sometimes, and then I take photos of my longhand writing. I digitize it, and then I ask for comments and ideas and, you know, things I missed to your point about the keynote. But if I would start with asking the AI, I'm giving a keynote on this. give me a few ideas, that's at that point I don't think I am necessary anymore.

28:10Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd then I think also- at that point we're missing human originality and human creativity, which still, I believe, is greater than that you can get from machines. Also because the creativity in the machines is derived from human creativity. We are we are capable of creating truly novel things, so we should start with the human. So judgment centric, always start with the human are things that I think are so important when it comes to the use of AI.

28:37Nicklas Berild LundbladOtherwise you end up in what's sort of now popularly called cognitive offloading or cognitive surrender where you're essentially saying, Oh, there's this thinking machine here. let's have it think for me because that seems like okay, and I don't have the energy for thinking right now. And that's a path we should absolutely avoid, I think.

28:57Petri KokkoThat I think is one of the key learnings from the last half hour- if I were to put it that way, is that always start by thinking yourself first. And I think that is something that it's like if there's nothing else you take out of this- I would say that. And this is something also that I have been very much emphasizing at the business school is that we need to start, always start thinking first as well as I think business schools need to teach thinking.

29:30Petri KokkoThey teach concepts and teach thinking because through that we can then use these assistants in driving different things. what other things would you not hand over to AI today?

29:47Nicklas Berild LundbladSo I... The most important thing I think is what we just talked about. I wouldn't hand over the first draft to an AI at all. I wouldn't, I also wouldn't hand over reading to an AI. So I actually tend to believe that reading is really important, and I like to read myself. I don't want just to have an AI sum up what an article says or sum up what a book says. Sometimes if it's in the periphery, it can be fine to just know what the main argument in a book is.

30:15Nicklas Berild LundbladBut if I'm really working on something, then I want to really get into it myself, and the experience of reading a book changes you. And that means that next time you sit down and write, you have new things to write about. So I don't hand off reading. I don't hand off the first draft. I don't hand off judgment. Those are the key things that I try to make sure remain very solidly within my purview. and I think those are the key things.

30:44Nicklas Berild LundbladWell, what I also have found is I need to be very clear when handing off scheduling because I was at some point scheduled to have 20 meetings in a day because the AI was going for efficiency and not necessarily for just human survival at this point. so there are a few things where, you know, you have to be very clear about your delegation as well. and I think that's important. And maybe to offer a more a more complex point, I think what you do not want to do is to hand over to the AI to decide your ontology for you.

31:17Nicklas Berild LundbladAn ontology is like a very, it's like a fancy word of the stuff that exists. If you, if you sort of take your world description from your AI, then you will be limited in the way you think. You should own the way you describe the world, its ontology, the stuff that exists, how it interrelates. That is something that belongs to you. Being able to specify, describe, invent ontologies or world models, I think is a key to the long-term use of complex AI as well. What about you? What do you not hand over?

31:52Petri KokkoWell, we mentioned already about the thinking and the beginning of that process. otherwise you'll get the averages of averages, and you don't get the thinking of, so to say an unorthodox thinking as well. so you're missing that. there are areas of data, for example financial data, that I'm very hesitant with. There are health data today where I'm very hesitant with. And so there are areas like this, and I don't know should I be that hesitant or not, but I am very hesitant with those.

32:30Petri KokkoAnd the question always obviously is that do you trust this not to use your data in the, in the training? do you trust them not to leak your data and so on? And I don't have the answer to that right now and but it makes me a bit hesitant. And sometimes I feel like I could probably be more efficient if I would trust them more, so to say. The question is that do I dare to trust them more? Do you trust this?

33:02Nicklas Berild LundbladWell, no, I think this is a good point. I think it's not necessarily about the handing over the data. What sort of concerns me is the use and ownership of the data. But so to me, this is actually an area for massive innovation. I would- be happy to hand over my health data to a trust, and then have- that trust anonymize and aggregate the data in such a way that AI companies could do research on it.

33:22Nicklas Berild LundbladI would actually- quite I would love that because that would mean that I could have better health outcomes in different ways. So for me that would be good. But what we lack here is institutional innovation. And the kind of institutional innovation that's needed is essentially innovation that allows for individual trust and technological learning. so how do you enable the maximum amount of learning on the side of the AI companies and the maximum amount of trust on the side of the users?

33:48Nicklas Berild LundbladI think the, it's not inconceivable to me that there could be like a third-party institutional solution to that would be quite interesting- because I would love to, I would love to have an AI look at my health data and

34:02Petri KokkoAgree

34:03Nicklas Berild LundbladYou do this and this and this, and you'll be, you know, feeling much better.

34:07Petri KokkoAgree. Finan- finance is the same thing.

34:09Nicklas Berild LundbladYeah, totally. If, you know, if you could hand over your finances, you could hand over... I think finances is interesting because we're all trying to get an individual edge. There's like a really interesting risk being discussed by the, by the central banks right now, which is that people actually do hand over their finances to ChatGPT. So they will ask ChatGPT, What should my portfolio look like? then you get a portfolio recommendation. But then what happens if 100 million people get the same portfolio recommendation and ChatGPT one morning wakes up and says, You should sell Nvidia. And the 100 million people managing-

34:41Petri KokkoAgree

34:41Nicklas Berild LundbladThe portfolios through ChatGPT does that. The volatility that then results.

34:45Petri KokkoBut now you outsource your thinking. And we said, we just said earlier that we should not outsource the thinking. What I would use it for more or less is that, for exam- sample say that what's my exposure to hyperscalers? Because like you have ETFs, funds. You might have even bonds from them. You might have, you know, stocks from them and so on. very rarely can anybody tell me today is that what's my and through that, what's my the what's the risk that I'm taking?

35:19Petri KokkoBecause like probably these are all moving in the same direction. and so I would, I would use my 100 assistants to dig into these, to these instruments and then do calculations of how do they correlate with each other and how they don't correlate with each other and what's the risk there and is there a beta risk there and so on and so on. so I'm just saying that I think I would be willing to do that Which would help me to make better decisions.

35:46Petri KokkoBut I would not ask it to make that decision for me, so to say. And so that's, I think those are those areas where I would really be I would love it to work. I would also be probably willing to do it if, and I probably need to do some learning here, but so that I could run those locally on my, on my own laptops. And then I would be able to do those analysis. that's probably could be also one solution.

36:17Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd it's quite possible to do today. I mean, you can run some of the open weight models on your local MacBook if you want to. So it's- it is, it is probably going to more and more common. And you can imagine that kind of federated edge computing for AI being a thing for a lot of things that you want to do for, you know, photos, et cetera, et cetera, that you don't want to upload to the cloud.

36:37Nicklas Berild LundbladSo I think that will probably come. But there's something important about what you said about finances and you can sort of sum that up as a method, which is that what you do with finances is that you start with a hypothesis. You have a hypothesis about what good finance portfolio management looks like. And then you ask the machine to test the hypothesis. And I think that's a, that's another way of framing think first, is saying you should have a hypothesis about what you think the world looks like or what you want to do or what you think the solution to the problem is, then use the machine to test the hypothesis.

37:08Nicklas Berild LundbladNever allow the machine to give you the hypothesis. I think that's a, that's another way of sort of casting the problem.

37:13Petri KokkoI think you're hitting on a, on a, on a, on a really important note there, and I think this is one of those things that we need to cover in one of our podcasts later for example, board work. And how do you build strategies? How do you test strategies? How do you look at... 'Cause one of the most important jobs of a, of a, of a board is obviously oversight and see that everything goes well, but also is to evaluate strategies.

37:37Petri KokkoAnd what you can do with these things are absolutely amazing. And for example, I've built my own supervisory boards in order to make those, some of those decisions. We'll get back to that in another episode. But I think that I think you're hitting one of the key things here. I have two quick questions for you, and then let's wrap up. one for me is that if there would be one habit for all the listeners to start with this week, and we're now middle of the week, so what would that be?

38:12Nicklas Berild LundbladHabit of asking the AI to teach you something about how you can use AI in order to become more, in order to learn faster. That's a habit that I think is really good to acquire quickly.

38:24Petri KokkoI think that's

38:24Nicklas Berild LundbladWhat would your choice be?

38:26Petri KokkoOh, I like, I like that. I think one of the things really is to dig into these tools. I've been saying quite often that my imagination is the limit for what I can do with these things. So I think the first question I always should ask is that, so could this be automated? What I'm now doing, could it be automated? And if it could automate it. I have one big question coming up.

38:57Nicklas Berild LundbladUh-oh.

38:59Petri KokkoWhat does the world look like a year from now? What does your crystal ball say? I know you have it in front of you, and you've been thinking a lot about this, and I know well, you have one of those companies that are also looking into more as forecasting, foresight, and so on. what-

39:14Nicklas Berild LundbladYeah, we do foresight. We do forecasting, et cetera. I think, I think it's really interesting because to me I think the evolution of AI is going much faster than we recognize. So I think that the world might be very different in a year than it is now. So I think, for example, that we will see agents fully integrated with everything that you can do on a screen. I think that is going to be a difference. So you can ask an AI, and you can do it in voice mode or any other mode, to do anything that you can currently do on a screen.

39:41Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd if you think about what that means, it means that, you know, the screens and the keyboards might no longer actually be necessary. So one of my sort of soft predictions would be that we probably will see new form factors for AI within the year because nobody has cracked what the device looks like that encapsulates AI in a great way. We're still using phones. We're still using computers. We're still using keyboards, and I think that might change.

40:06Nicklas Berild LundbladSo I will be really interested to see what the form factor is, and I do think that we will be delegating a whole lot more to our collection of agents. And then I think that within a year we will also have experienced a lot more in terms of security incidents, and that has just started. So our systems will become less connected. I predict, and this is not going out on a limb, that freezers will not be connected to the internet in a year from now.

40:34Petri KokkoYes. Yeah. I think that's I, I'd love to come back on that in a year's time to see what people-

40:42Nicklas Berild LundbladYes. You should hold me accountable. You should hold me accountable

40:46Petri KokkoWhat happened. topics we want to cover in this going forward, I mentioned already we need to be looking into how should AI sit on the boards table- board table, and how should actually every single board member in the future and already today have, so to say, their own agents to do the, to do research. I think that is a fundamental change that we will see in my view, how companies are managed. data centers.

41:16Nicklas Berild LundbladData centers.

41:18Petri KokkoWell, I think we should absolutely look into that topic. you mentioned the data security and all of this area. I think that should be one of those areas. I would love to also for us to discuss a little bit how do we trust those tools, and can those tools be trusted, and can we... what should companies... Like I see so many companies today, they say, Okay, you know what? We have this license with Microsoft Copilot. you are not allowed to use anything else.

41:50Petri KokkoAnd then the employees or the students, they use all kind of other tools, so to say, widely.

41:56Nicklas Berild LundbladOh, there's huge shadow use. I think you're right.

41:59Petri KokkoExactly. and what we can do with that. Any other topics you think we should be covering?

42:05Nicklas Berild LundbladYeah, I think, well, I think we talked about this before. One, there are a couple of things that I think we should add to your excellent list, and one of them is we should talk about AI in the labor market. What will actually happen- to your job? We should also talk about AI and universities and higher education.

42:18Petri KokkoI love it.

42:18Nicklas Berild LundbladHow do you think about AI when everyone can write an excellent essay- with, you know, pushing a few buttons? How do you reorganize higher education and research around that? And then I think there is, there is there is, there is also I think at some point we should just tackle the geopolitics of the thing. The US, China, Europe sovereignty. Who does what, who, and, you know, and what do we need to be able to do in Europe, and how should we put some clout behind European regulation and demands?

42:49Nicklas Berild LundbladAnd should we, or do we risk sliding behind? So I think those are things I would add to your list, and I would I'm looking forward to discussing them.

42:55Petri KokkoFantastic. So am I. Thank you very much, Nicklas. It was great catching up with you as always.

43:00Nicklas Berild LundbladLikewise, Jussi.

43:02Petri KokkoEnjoy the bright fall in the archipelago-

43:05Nicklas Berild LundbladI definitely will

43:06Petri KokkoIn Sweden, and we will be catching up very soon.

43:10Nicklas Berild LundbladWe will. Thank you.