I’m truly concerned that so many people still believe that things were better in the past and that the future looks dim. Most of us think we as individuals have no opportunity to create change or influence the future. I also see a growing number of people living in denial of the truth—or creating their own version of it—despite the overwhelming evidence and proven facts now more available than ever before. As long as we have these kinds of people in the decision-making roles of our society, it will slow down the change or even stop it.

Over the past 30 years working in the technology space, both for myself and for various global companies, I’ve become an expert in end-user experience and a lifetime student in how humans and technology interact. This expertise has enabled me to successfully predict tech trends 2-5 years into the future, from forecasting virtual reality in the 1990s to “smart buildings” (or as I call them, “Empathetic Buildings”) today. I continue to study trends and work with the science community to chart the future of technology for the betterment of humanity. I am also in demand as a keynote speaker to talk about these trends and how we can use them to spark future innovation.

I’ve always been a computer nerd, starting out with a ZX Spectrum in the early 1980s where I used BASIC programming language to develop games. My first computer game was called Mike on the Moon, a simple game with the objective to move your character along the low gravity moon surface to pick up treasures and avoid hitting sharp objects. I got my first PC toward the end of the 1980s, and by 1992 I had made my first commercial application using the first version of Visual Basic. I had a vision at that time to create a business out of network gaming (eSport), so I asked Compaq for 6 brand new powerful PC’s and created a public cafe for network gaming, Internet and use of virtual reality. My partner and I even struck a Nordic import deal with iClasses to obtain virtual reality gear for consumers. Unfortunately, the tech was not yet ready; VR content was practically non-existent at that time (only a few games and tech demos) and the consumer price was too high for the business to be self-sustaining. We were too far ahead of our time, and in the end, I declared my first (and hopefully last) bankruptcy.

My first global end-user service project was with an Intranet global consulting company in the mid-1990s. My responsibility was service design and application development (HTML/ASP), and this project was where I first noticed the importance of the user interface. I observed how many variations were possible, and I learned a lot about the end-users’ capacity to learn new things. At this point, I became interested not only in applications but also in human behavior. By the end of the 1990s, I was selected to work at MPS Corporation, a Finnish company that provides expertise in management and strategic personnel solutions. My primary target was the digitalization of career management services, including recruitment assessment tests. That job became my school to understand human behavior and employee experience more deeply. It had a huge impact on my future work with change management.

Nearly 15 years ago, I started working at Tieto Corporation, a leading Nordic software and services company. In my role there, I worked with leading global companies in manufacturing, forest, retail, banking, insurance and the public sector creating digital services that generated billions of Euros for my customers. I hate bad user experience, so end-user centric design has always played a key role in all the B2B and B2C services that I have worked with. Customer value has always been my primary goal in all my projects, and that has led to great success and customer satisfaction over the years

My experience with IoT (Hand of Industrial Internet) began in a traditional manner. I had numerous customers in my portfolio who had an IoT platform, sensors, and analytic toolset, so I began meeting with them and asking for use cases and problems we could start solving. After spending almost a year banging my head against the wall with non-inspiring pilots, a made a decision to begin creating products that were more future-ready than the ones my customers had identified. This inspiration became the seed for the first drafts of what has become Empathetic Reality (ER).