Brillian turns two this month. When Tarmo Pajunen, Tatu Hautala, and I founded the company in October 2024, generative AI was already everywhere in personal chat windows, but far less visible in how companies actually worked. Most organizations were experimenting: a pilot here, a proof of concept there, and far too few of them ever reaching production or creating lasting value.
Having spent most of my career building industrial automation and digital platforms, I recognized the pattern. Promising technology rarely fails on the technology itself. It stalls somewhere between the demo and daily use. We started Brillian to close that exact gap: to take companies the whole way, from AI strategy to AI in daily use.
Two years later, the questions we hear have changed. Agentic AI has moved from conference slides into real workflows, and clients no longer ask what AI could do for them. They ask how to deploy it across the whole organization. AI is now on the agenda of every leadership team and board we meet.
One lesson has become hard to ignore along the way. As the models keep getting better, what holds organizations back is less the technology and more their own knowledge. An agent is only as useful as the context it can reach. Whether a company's knowledge and data are available, accessible, and accumulating is quickly becoming what separates organizations that get real value from AI from those still running pilots.
“What holds organizations back is less the technology and more their own knowledge.”
Rethink, evolve and thrive
Our ambition has always been to help companies grow and evolve with AI in ways that genuinely matter. Two years of client work have made that more concrete: it takes the courage to rethink how a business works, the patience to evolve step by step, and a clear sense of what it means to thrive once AI is part of daily work.
Working closely with our clients has shown us that AI transformation happens on several interconnected levels at the same time: leadership, where the business sets its direction and ambition for AI; change, where people adopt new skills and ways of working alongside AI; knowledge, where the company's own data and expertise become something both people and agents can build on; and applications, where AI goes into real workflows and stays trustworthy in production. Progress on one level rarely sticks unless the others move with it.
Of these, knowledge is the one we find ourselves talking about most with clients right now. It is less about data infrastructure than it sounds, and more about making what an organization knows, including what lives only in people's heads, usable every day. It is also where personal productivity with AI either stays personal or turns into something the whole organization can build on.
From strategy advice to delivery under one roof
Brillian was international from day one. Our very first client came from the UK, which set the tone: we wanted to work with leading companies wherever they are based. Today, that has grown to over 40 clients in seven countries, across software and technology, manufacturing and machinery, health and life sciences, media, transport and the public sector. They range from Carnival Cruise Line, one of the world’s largest cruise lines, and Storytel, the publicly listed Swedish audiobook and streaming company, to Finnish companies such as Bondata, Europress, Futursoft, Simucube and Treon. Along the way, we built a strategic partnership with Siemens to drive industrial AI adoption, and this year AI Finland selected us as a strategic partner.
"Today, Brillian has worked with over
40 clients in seven countries."
We have grown from three founders to a team of 20 people in Helsinki and Tampere. The mix is deliberate. Some of us work with leadership teams and organizations on strategy and change, while others are engineers and architects who build agentic environments and evaluation for LLMs. Having advisory and technical delivery under one roof is what lets us stay with a client all the way to results instead of stopping at recommendations.
This year, we moved into new offices in both Tampere and Helsinki, which has made it much easier to bring the team together and keep building the Brillian culture. With clients already across Europe and the US, growing our international presence is a natural next step.
Looking ahead to 2027
With AI moving this fast, long-term predictions age badly. Still, a few themes look likely to shape the coming year.
AI deployment is moving from individual tools to the company level. Personal productivity gains are real, but they do not add up to a competitive edge on their own. The bigger question for 2027 is how to turn them into capability across the whole organization, and that runs through knowledge, leadership decisions, and governance more than through any single tool.
Roles will increasingly be defined by outcomes rather than tasks. If work is described as a list of tasks, AI will gradually take over the tasks. Describing roles by the outcomes and purpose they serve gives people a better place to stand next to agents, and that conversation works best when held openly with the people it concerns.
Responsible AI becomes concrete. As agents take on more work, transparency, control over data and models, and honest conversations about the role of humans become part of every deployment rather than a separate track. For European companies in particular, questions of data and model sovereignty are moving quickly up the agenda. That also means saying clearly when AI is not the right answer.
Above all, the next phase will be defined less by novelty and more by execution: AI moving from pilots into products, operations and daily work. That is the work we enjoy most, because that is where AI starts to create real impact.
Thank you to our clients and partners for your trust, and to every Brillian who has built this company with us. Two years in, we are just getting started.
