I build technology products and teams. Here, I write about building with AI, work, and judgment.
In May 2025 I gave the opening keynote at Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn. It's three stories about getting AI features into production: one from Veriff, one from NFTPort, one from Pactum. The full video is on YouTube (about 28 minutes of talk, then half an hour of questions). Below are the slides with what I said about
I joined Veriff as its first ML engineer, and almost immediately we realised we needed to scale up the AI effort very fast. I hired ten people in four months, and ended up leading the team myself four or five months in. One of those ten was fresh out of university with a master's in physics and almost
A thinking partner's value is in what it pulls out of you, not the text it writes. Five things stock Claude gets wrong, and the 800 words of instructions that fix them.
People worry that if AI keeps improving, there will be nothing impressive left for humans to do. I disagree. What counts as impressive will simply change. A full rewrite of an existing large piece of code today is not trivial, but it's also definitely not impressive anymore. Five years ago, a full rewrite of the right type of
Identity, payments, and accountability online have never really been solved. They're not built into the protocols themselves. Payment was in the web's original vision: Tim Berners-Lee's first HTTP spec already had status code 402, "Payment required", where the client could retry a request "with a suitable ChargeTo header". No
Estonia announced it will give AI agents digital IDs, and people are kind of skeptical and negative about it. I'm not. I think there's something to this. In general, I try not to shoot down new ideas by arguing against them as a knee-jerk reaction. Many ideas, when born, look quite weak or dumb. But
I recently used Claude to do the annual report for my holding company. It's an extremely simple company. There are no meaningful decisions to be made here. One invoice this year, and it's obvious how it should be handled. Still, Claude saved me probably an hour of searching for the correct way of doing things. I
One more thing that's annoying when using AI as a coach: any amount of reasoning tokens will make me switch away. Latency actually matters here. Two seconds is okay; twenty ruins the flow. There is also something more subtle. I don't take as much responsibility for my thoughts, am not as critical. I don't
Can you build an AI coach? The obvious answer is yes: AI is great at spotting patterns in what you say, and you can ask it to use any style of coaching, any framework. An exec coach I used to work with thinks you can't build an AI coach, because true change happens in relation to another human.
In May 2026 I sat on a panel at Latitude59 in Tallinn called "AI in Your Org: What to Automate, What to Keep Human", with the chief of staff at Hostinger and a co-founder of Sera Leads. Three very different company sizes: 900 people, 150, and 10. Below are my answers, pulled out of the discussion and
