Martti Kuldma: Less Talk About AI, More Using It
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. Optimists see it transforming business and productivity; pessimists see it replacing jobs. But much of the discussion remains abstract. We hear that AI will “increase efficiency” or “replace people”, but much less about what this actually means during an ordinary working day.
At Omniva, we have taken a practical approach: where can AI solve a specific problem, and how should the work process change as a result? Several projects are already giving us answers.
AI is already doing real work, but people remain part of the process
One example is an AI solution in our customer service. It prepares responses to customer emails using current information from our systems, such as parcel location and expected delivery time. An employee reviews the response before sending it.
Around half of the proposed responses can currently be sent without changes. The rest require human input – for example, rephrasing the answer, adding a link or clarifying a detail. With several hundred thousand customer emails a year, even partially automating this process has considerable impact.
But the more interesting change is not simply that AI drafts emails faster. It changes the process itself, because AI handles the first draft and retrieves the relevant information; people focus their attention where judgement is needed. The question therefore becomes less about which jobs AI will replace and more about which parts of a job technology can do better.
More people can now build solutions to their own problems
The same principle is behind our Vibe Coding Academy, where employees who are not programmers use AI to build small tools for their own work.
Previously, turning an idea into a digital tool could require defining requirements, finding IT resources and waiting for development. AI makes it possible to test smaller ideas much faster. It does not replace professional IT development, but it allows employees to solve problems that might previously have been too small or expensive to develop a technological solution for. Several such tools are already in use at Omniva.
We have also built an internal platform for creating AI agents and automated workflows for different business processes. The point is not to accumulate individual AI tools, but to build the ability to test solutions, reuse what works and scale successful approaches across the company.
The advantage is the ability to rethink work
This is where the bigger opportunity lies, as AI is useful when it makes an existing task faster, but its greater value comes from reconsidering the process itself: what should be done by people, what can be entrusted to technology, and where the two work best together.
Not every experiment will succeed, and technology is changing too quickly to build one perfect solution for the long term. The competitive advantage is therefore unlikely to be one particular AI tool – it will be the ability to experiment quickly, learn what works, discard what does not, and scale what proves useful.
We can keep debating whether AI will eventually bring us a four-day working week, universal basic income or a world without work. For companies and the public sector, a more useful question is already in front of us: what work are we doing today that could be done differently tomorrow?
Martti Kuldma, Chairman of the Management Board of Omniva