Why AI Won’t Steal Your Job—But Will Change It

Mark Smith: 0:19
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Helsinki, Finland. He is a president of AI and co-pilot at the Digital Neighbourhood. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He has been recognized over 15 times as one of the top 100 ICT influencers in Finland. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show note for this episode. Welcome to the show, Aki.

Aki Antman: 1:09
Thank you so much, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for the nice introduction.

Mark Smith: 1:15
I'm looking forward to the discussion, particularly in your experiences in AI and co-pilot. But before we get started, tell me a bit about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not playing with technology?

Aki Antman: 1:28
Well, it's work, but it's also a hobby. So I do play a lot around technology in my free time as well. But I do have three children, the oldest one being already 18 this year 16-year-old daughter, and I'll provide a joy for a four-year-old son who keeps us pretty busy. I love reading, I love playing sports like tennis, stuff like that, and actually I love watches and fast cars.

Mark Smith: 1:56
Nice, Nice. What a great selection and a great span of children. My oldest is 19 and my youngest is two, so I have a similar type spectrum to you there for my three children. That's interesting watches and fast cars. How did that come about?

Aki Antman: 2:18
I don't know my father. He has always been a sports car enthusiast. I have been lucky enough to drive one since I turned 18 and got my driver's license, and it has sticked with me. I'm 50 years old now, but I still love those fast cars.

Mark Smith: 2:34
Nice, nice, I like it. How did you get into technology? What's been your journey? Why was that the career of choice for you?

Aki Antman: 2:43
Well, I was 20 years old so that was like 1986, and I applied for a job as a cleaner, like cleaning factory floors, and I didn't get the job because I didn't have any experience and I was too young and my father told me that well, but you are interested in computers. A friend of mine is looking for a software developer in his IT company. Could you do that? I said yeah, of course, and then I went there for an interview. I was 12 years old and I got the job, and that's the only thing I have done ever since. But the only reason is that I wasn't old enough and good enough to be a cleaner.

Mark Smith: 3:21
Wow, that's an incredible story. That's outstanding. I love it. How have you then, how has that progressed into AI for you, how you know? When did AI start becoming a thing for you, that you became aware of it and started to take interest in it, and what do you do in the AI space now?

Aki Antman: 3:45
So basically I actually have my master's degree in the computer science from the helsinki university and I started studying there in 92. Now actually, they were, of course, developing linux over there. They were talking a lot of about ai back already and I was always fascinated by it and then of course it went a little bit to the background and I have always studied AI and looking forward to the day when it becomes a common issue and when everyone talks about AI. And then, like in the late 22, ai finally woke up with the release of Chatsky PT to the public and I knew from that moment that this will change everything.

Mark Smith: 4:24
Wow, and you're right. Right, it's permeating every part of our life nowadays. Even the way our podcast has changed dramatically in how much AI is used to do the post-production work, tidy up the audio, all now infused with AI, even selecting the titles of the show, show notes, all done by AI, which used to be all manually transcripted, et cetera in the past, no longer needed. So I've definitely noticed it's permeated every area. What's the common projects you're involved with nowadays? Um, particularly in the co-pilot space with microsoft.

Aki Antman: 5:04
Well, it really depends because, as you said, I live here in Helsinki, finland. We have customers here. We have customers in Sweden, denmark, in the Netherlands and across Europe. But we also have a subsidiary in the United Arab Emirates and they are actually much more advanced there and it's a bit scary for us Europeans. But the projects, they actually vary quite a lot from country to country. Actually, in the UAE we are training the whole nation, we are training the Abu Dhabi government on them becoming AI native by 27. And that's only like two years away. And we are training tens and tens of thousands of people there on Copilot and AI.

Mark Smith: 5:51
So that interests me how do you train people on Copilot?

Aki Antman: 5:56
Well, actually this was a customer event in Italy about six months ago, and Satya Nadella said to some of our customers there that you cannot train by watching other people train, that you cannot train by watching other people train, meaning that if I'm watching you lifting weights, it doesn't build up my muscle until I start lifting them myself. So the main thing is that we have to get people curious. We have to get people to start using AI in small tasks and then in the bigger tasks, and only then they have the right mindset to start thinking about building agents and building more advanced use cases that you can actually measure on your P&L. But it's all about getting the people to get started.

Mark Smith: 6:38
So how do you get people to get started? Why I'm so interested. I'm currently writing a book on co-pilot adoption and I just find the stories from the field fascinating on how you take people that might be particularly resistant to AI not specifically co-pilot in this case, but the resistant comes from a technology that some people fear might take their jobs right. Nobody feared that Microsoft Teams was going to take their job when I said, hey, you need to learn Microsoft Teams in the pandemic. But now we've got a piece of technology that people are being encouraged to use and there's sometimes some skepticism. How do you get beyond that to get folks into a mindset of how this can help them become more efficient, get rid of the mundane nature of their work in many situations and allow them you know, perhaps to go home early from work because they're getting their stuff done?

Aki Antman: 7:39
Exactly. Actually, one of our customers in the UAE. They are already experimenting with a four-day work week for all of their employees because of the cost savings coming from AI. So basically, it's not even about getting home early, but it's getting for like four-day working week.

Aki Antman: 7:55
But your question back to that, it's a good one. It's a super good one because that's completely true what you say about the mindset and people fearing that AI will take their jobs, and, in any case, it's all about change, because you have to change the way how you work with AI. You have to unlearn many new things, and that's always difficult for us human beings. So, of course, nowadays we have over 400 co-pilot customer organizations. We have trained well over 100,000 people. So for us it's pretty easy nowadays because we can share the success stories. We can share what other people are doing, what other organizations like you are doing, how successful they have been, how they are measuring the success, how they are getting the results. So it's actually nowadays much easier.

Aki Antman: 8:43
But it's all about like getting people excited, showing them what they can do with AI, showing them what AI can do for them. But after that it's super important, as I said earlier, to start experimenting themselves. And I think one thing to do that is to go to real life use cases as soon as possible, because if you are just experimenting with the tools available on web, you get some ideas of what they could do with you, but when you start working with, for example, copilot with your own data, then you can finally start to realize, oh, this will actually help me, this will actually free up my time and, as you said for the podcast, it frees you from the routine works. So the things that you had to do manually before, now you can let AI automate them and you get to do more podcasts or spend more spare time or whatever.

Mark Smith: 9:41
Yeah, what's your thoughts and how have you seen? Over the last couple of months, microsoft introduced Microsoft M365 Copilot Chat as the free version to complement or lead into Microsoft M365 Copilot. Have you seen the chat version as an enabler inside organizations that are perhaps resistant to getting on? You know a paid subscription of Copilot. How have you seen the benefit of that particular SKU from Microsoft?

Aki Antman: 10:17
Yeah, yeah, it's actually a super good thing for our customers and for us as well, because we have been talking a lot for years now that you should give access to AI for everyone and, of course, buying licenses for everyone. To begin with, it could be too big investment. So now you can actually give the access to Copilot chat for everyone. We can train them very quickly and they can start using it and start having that AI era mindset. So in that way, it's super important. You can also build agents and then you can have them using those, and to me, it's a stepping stone towards the Microsoft 365 Copilot that you can actually use inside the tools you use for your daily work anyways, but you have to remember that the Copilot chart is not only for us office workers. It's also for frontline workers, and this is one part that most people seem to be missing, because tutors of the people of the global workforce, they are frontline workers and we should give them AI tools as quickly as possible, because they benefit a lot from them.

Mark Smith: 11:27
Where are you seeing the benefits come in? Are there, you know? Do use cases jump to mind that you're seeing? I suppose the light bulb come on for people to all of a sudden like, oh my gosh, this, I can do this, I can do that. At what point are you kind of seeing that transition moment for people to really start to go? You know what? I can experiment with this. I can try new things. I want to try new things and I want to use it more in what I do, not because somebody else's management is saying I should do it, but because I see the value myself.

Aki Antman: 12:03
Yeah, exactly, and that's the thing, because you need to have the support from the top leadership.

Aki Antman: 12:08
We are seeing it from time to time that all those organizations, our customers, where you have the support from the top leadership and where they are actually using AI not just promoting it, but using it daily, the results are much quicker, they are much better.

Aki Antman: 12:23
But, of course, we have to tell everyone, we have to show everyone what is in it for me, how I can make my workday more successful, easier for me, how I can be more innovative with AI and so on. And, of course, for the frontline people think about it most of our global customers, their workforce usually speaks 20 languages, 50 languages, 70 languages or whatever, and they need to be able to support all those people. And nowadays, with the advancements in the AI, translations and using spoken language and using multimodal models, meaning that you can just point your smartphone camera to something and ask for advice and then the AI will help you. And if it cannot, it's going to redirect you to real people and a human being who can help you. Even if you don't speak the same language, you can still have a conversation and you can get to help real time.

Mark Smith: 13:22
Yeah, this is incredible. Now you've had what I think Copilot all up is about 18 months old now that it's been in the market, you've obviously seen a lot happen. If we look to the future, and if you specifically look to the future, where do you see where potentially we will be in 18 months time? I'm not going to go for two years, five years, because I just think that's who knows right but in the next, you know, even by the end of this year and getting into 2026, where do you think we're we're going to be from a workplace um enablement perspective, using tools like co-pilot?

Aki Antman: 14:03
That's a very good question, and if you had asked me for that five-year thing, I would have said I have absolutely no idea. 18 months even. That is hard to predict, but we will actually see that we will be typing a lot less, we will be using the keyboard a lot less, and I have been typing almost all my life, but I did learn how to speak before I did learn to type. So it's very natural for us and I can see myself nowadays using AI more and more just by voice or just through the user interface, because too many times people think that chatting with the AI is the best user interface. It's not. It's most likely the worst, but in many cases it's still the only one we have. But that will be replaced by other user interface components, whether they are like just traditional Windows or whatever graphical user interface, whether they are your smartphone, whether they are your speech, whether it's your car, whatever. But we will be using AI in so many ways other than typing into the chat.

Mark Smith: 15:09
Tell me about you personally and your personal use of AI, because I love the analogy you used before. I can't go to the gym and expect to build muscle by watching somebody else work out at the gym, and I just think that's a poignant metaphor. And I just see so many people in the AI space talking about AI and then I drill in and ask them so how do you use it? And they're like oh, you know, I know how to talk about it, and I'm talking about Microsoft people in many situations. They know how to talk about it, they know how to sell it, but they're not using it like they're not. It's not their second nature to use ai in every part of their day. How do you use it?

Aki Antman: 15:50
uh, it was like five months ago. This is a nice example. I was invited to give a keynote, uh, to people in medicine marketing and I was driving there and then I realized that I have absolutely no idea what medicine marketing is. And I'm going to give a keynote to these people and I know what I'm going to say about AI and stuff like that. That I do know. But medicine marketing, what is that? And then I just decided when I was driving, let's have a discussion.

Aki Antman: 16:17
That was actually with Chutky PT, unwanted Voice back then it had just been released and I decided to have a conversation with that, asking by the way, what is medicine marketing? And then I got the overview and then I was asking that I'm giving this keynote to these people about this and this and this, what kind of questions I might expect? And then it gave me some questions and, okay, here are my answers. Can you score them? And I did that while driving to the venue in 20 minutes. And now I do know quite a lot about medicine marketing. I wouldn't have learned that without AI. Wow.

Mark Smith: 16:52
Any other ways you're using it?

Aki Antman: 16:55
Wow, there are quite many ways. Actually, we just wrote a book on AI as well and it's called From Copilot to Commander and we had to rewrite it a couple of times because we were too busy to release it and of course, everything went wrong so quickly. So we used AI extensively and Copilot extensively to do fact-checking, what's outdated today and stuff like that, do all the back-end research, do like the referencing and stuff like that. But also when we had to rewrite so many paragraphs and chapters because of the delays on our own side, copilot was invaluable in that and also part of the books. We just spoke with Rosun Boyd, the other author. We were just having team discussions with co-pilot on and then we prompted the book from those discussions partially. So actually there are paragraphs in the book where no one has typed a word.

Mark Smith: 17:54
Yeah, I get that. It's one of the exercises. Today I was doing the same type of thing with my co-author. We just we jumped on teams, we looked at a particular chapter we were going to write, we riffed on what we thought should go in the chapter and why it was important, and brought together our experiences, use cases and then co-pilot, you know, summarizes, you discuss this. This was the kind of flow and then, of course, you go well, is that the best flow for the chapter? And well, you should reorder this. And is there any gaps? And it's like it's incredible how it has become a sparring partner in, in organizing your thoughts and the way you're thinking. That is not just about your own personal thinking, but how is this going to be perceived by others? That is potentially going to consume it. Does it make sense to them? And are you leaving something else out because you've got a gap in your thinking on something? And, of course, I love the way it can bring in that kind of other ideas and opinions to your own.

Aki Antman: 19:01
Exactly, and while you do that, you always learn something. So if you were just writing, by typing in your word, you are just organizing your thoughts and maybe you get some new ideas, but you don't actually learn anything, you don't get anything new.

Aki Antman: 19:14
But when you talk about your writing with AI, you actually learn something by writing. It's amazing. And one other idea it was actually last night that Mr Trump announced those new tariffs which are terrible, by the way, but I was watching the announcement, it was late Finnish time and I was actually deploying an army of agents to do the research for me. So what are the implications to the Microsoft partners here in Finland, here in the European Union, in the EMEA area and globally, and also what are the implications to our business and our main customers? And I had that research by morning when I woke up and I was actually able to send a plan to our CAO on how this affects us early today morning. Without AI and agents, that would have been completely impossible. I would have needed a team of 30 people, which I don't have, to do that research.

Mark Smith: 20:14
That's amazing. Are you building your agents with a specific tooling, in other words, a you know um? Are you using microsoft or using, you know um, the swarm feature in chat, gpt, or using something from claude? What's your, what's your tool of choice at the moment for the agents that you're building using yourself?

Aki Antman: 20:36
uh, when I do something myself, I use quite many tools.

Aki Antman: 20:39
I like to experiment with them. As I said earlier, it's a hobby as well, but mostly I'm actually using chat, kpt on my spare time when I'm not working with company data. But of course, the most of the things we do we I need access to my work information, all the documents and stuff like that, and and then of course, we are building most of the agents, and I'm building most of the agents with Copilot Studio. Of course, we are doing some things with also AI Foundry as well, and we are definitely building custom code, custom engine agents as well, utilizing whatever language models or whatever small or large language models and other AI tools, like whether they are machine learning or computer vision or whatever in the background as well. So it's a big mix. But I would say that on any given organization in the next 12 months, I would say that 90% of the HSA are built with low-code, no-code tools, mostly Copilot Studio, which is getting better all the time, and only 10% or something like that will be built by nerds like us using Pro Code.

Mark Smith: 21:45
Aki, it's been so good talking to you. Time has flown, such an interesting topic. I'm loving the stories that you tell and your experience. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Mark Smith: 21:55
Thank you, time really flies when you're having fun, and I did have a lot of fun talking with you. Thank you about great questions. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application mvp mark smith, otherwise known as the nz365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you you.