Finland needs to embrace AI to drive future growth
Mervi Airaksinen, Managing Director of Microsoft Finland, and Timo Ritakallio, President and Group CEO of OP Financial Group, believe that AI holds the key to unlocking new levels of productivity and economic growth for Finland.
Fueled by high interest rates and government austerity measures, the Finnish economy has been sluggish and the tone of discussions around economic growth have been pessimistic throughout the year.
In May 2024, Finland’s largest financial company OP Financial Group commissioned a survey which showed that the pessimistic mood is also shared by the citizens: up to two in three young Finnish adults consider their economic future bleak due to the aging population and weak economic growth, among other things.
Consumer confidence in Finland has also remained weak.
Do you see any beacons of hope in the economic environment?
“I definitely do,” says Mervi Airaksinen.
“For a long time, Finland has been seeking growth in productivity as well as new products and services that could accelerate economic growth. Generative AI emerged at just the right time. However, we cannot achieve the results we want if Finnish business leaders do not take the benefits of AI seriously and act accordingly,” she emphasizes.
According to Airaksinen, generative AI helps employees complete routine tasks faster, freeing up more capacity for developing new ideas – that is, the most productive work. A lighter workload could also help the public sector meet its obligations even with fewer resources available.
This sentiment is echoed by Timo Ritakallio:
“At the moment, Finnish companies are under-utilizing AI when setting their goals. As we deploy generative AI, we should be setting considerably more ambitious targets for boosting productivity and competitiveness and consequently our economic growth.”
Finns embrace new technologies quickly
According to Ritakallio and Airaksinen, Finland is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI revolution. The nation has strong technology expertise, thanks in part to Nokia’s legacy, and has embraced digitalization particularly in public services, which has accelerated the development of the overall IT service ecosystem.
We have adopted AI early, but that alone is not enough.
A recent study commissioned by Microsoft shows that Finnish organizations are ahead of the other Nordic countries in AI adoption, with 61% of the organizations already using AI, compared to 52% in Norway, 48% in Denmark, and 45% in Sweden.
“We have adopted AI early, but that alone is not enough. The Finnish economy has its own challenges, so we must focus on accelerating digital transformation and seek to leverage the new technologies for financial benefits even more purposefully,” Airaksinen says.
The data practices and processes of industries such as the financial and public sectors entail specific security requirements. The digital transformation of these sectors in Finland will continue to pick up speed, as Microsoft is building a datacenter region in Southern Finland. Thanks to the datacenter region, the most cutting-edge digital services can also be operated on Finnish soil.
Ritakallio sees this as a game-changer: “OP Financial Group is eagerly looking forward to the completion of Microsoft’s datacenter region in Finland. It will offer us opportunities to further drive the digital transformation of banking and insurance services. The datacenter region will also create significant opportunities for the Finnish business life and public sector in terms of advancing digitalization and thereby stimulating economic growth.”
From chatbots to data pooling and hyper-personalization
OP Financial Group is convinced of the commercial benefits of AI. One of the largest Finnish companies with some 14,000 employees and over 2.1 million customers, the group embarked on its AI journey already in 2017, introducing new features to its digital services to simplify the management of customers’ expenses and income and to automate the categorization of expenses, among other things. The company also launched a chatbot and its first machine-learning model, the OP Koti real estate price estimator.
Since then, OP Financial Group has made great strides in AI development.
Today, the GenAI based OP Maiju service helps the Group employees to carry out their tasks faster and easier, while OP Aina, using the newest AI models, is a personal, round-the-clock assistant to customers. Going forward, OP Aina will combine customers’ data from different services to ensure an even more seamless, first-class customer experience.
AI is also increasingly used to help prevent financial crimes.
The continued development of digital services – enabled primarily by AI – produces positive results. Customers are more ready to use digital channels when the available services are easier to use and offer more benefits than before.
“OP Financial Group is developing extremely interesting services in the areas of data pooling and hyper-personalization, among others. The fact that customers are increasing their use of OP’s mobile services year by year proves that AI has also improved service quality,” Airaksinen notes.
Both Airaksinen and Ritakallio highlight the tangible benefits of AI in their own work.
As a developer of generative AI technology, Microsoft has, in many ways, a vantage point for using AI assistance at work. Today, the most visible AI element in the daily lives of Microsoft employees is Copilot, which has become an important tool for all the company’s employees.
“Copilot saves one to two hours of my working time each day. It assists me by summarizing long email threads and, for example, documents related to regulation. Microsoft’s global organization operates across various time zones, so every morning Copilot provides me with summaries of meetings held overnight as well as email threads in my inbox, so I do not have to watch, for example, a two-hour meeting recording,” Airaksinen says.
“Copilot helps me stay up to speed, identify the important pieces of information in all the emails and chats, and focus on work that requires creative thinking.”
Ritakallio uses Copilot daily for various routine tasks, as well. He notes that even short periods of time saved accumulate over the course of the day and generate savings that make work easier and improve productivity.
Ensuring the responsible use of AI
Revolutionary innovations like generative AI naturally introduce new challenges to solve, too. Both Ritakallio and Airaksinen highlight that as the importance of AI grows at the workplace, organizations need to pay special attention to using the new technology responsibly and in compliance with ethical guidelines.
OP Financial Group started publishing an annual Data Balance Sheet that describes the company’s data governance and management practices already in 2018.
“In our Data Balance Sheet, we describe our practices for using AI, for example, in a comprehensive and transparent manner. We also have responsible AI policies which aim to ensure that AI applications are developed and used correctly for purposes that promote wellbeing,” Ritakallio says.
Microsoft has its own responsible AI standards that the company has developed and maintained for over a decade. These include, for example, principles and processes for AI development that must be considered when developing AI applications.
Airaksinen stresses the importance of open collaboration and knowledge sharing as AI technology rapidly evolves:
“In addition to our own operations, we are responsible for the Microsoft ecosystem – the companies and organizations that develop applications based on our technologies. Our standards are available to everyone so that parties such as our ecosystem partners can use them to develop their own ethical principles for their needs.”
“Sharing learnings is important as AI continues to develop. We are also happy to take inspiration from good responsible AI practices developed by our partners,” she concludes.
In a time of economic uncertainty, accelerating adoption of AI promises Finland a future where technology drives innovation, boosts productivity, and paves the way for sustainable economic growth.