Lauri Sulonen, head of financial planning at Finnish mobile gaming company Supercell, used to be sceptical about how much artificial intelligence would transform his job. “I thought there is so much context you need to know and people you need to talk to to get stuff done . . . that is hard for AI.”
But when he assigned an AI-powered “analyst agent” to produce the monthly performance report that typically took his team three hours, it was done in five minutes. Sulonen says the AI made no mistakes, the quality was good and it provided references to check the numbers. “I was pretty bearish before starting this . . . I’ve changed my assumptions.”
His AI partner for this task was Pigment, a specialist business planning platform based in France that carried out the “basic repetitive work that’s the least interesting for us, but most prone to human error”.