Artificial intelligence, capital and the decisions that shape our world. Research and conversations from Sami Miettinen, Head of AI at Translink Corporate Finance.
National Coalition Party MP Tere Sammallahti and Sami Miettinen go through Finland's annual tax-data release day, which Sammallahti calls Envy Day, and his bill to publish tax data only in anonymised form. They take apart the claim that the rich avoid tax through tricks and ask why a successful Finn still has to apologise. The political core is why the Finns Party is rising while the National Coalition falls, and whether the right-wing bloc can still reach a majority before the 2027 election; Sammallahti admits his party has failed at communication and warns the right against painting itself into separate corners. The episode closes on the threat of a French debt crisis, Finland's used-up fiscal buffer, Google's data centres, Valmet Automotive and AI forcing the public sector to change.
Jukka Ala-Mutka has modelled business processes for 25 years. In January 2026 he founded Managentics, whose platform uses about 50 small agents to model workflows while coding agents turn them into production systems. The episode explains how Finnish Consulting Group's 80 workflows were modelled in three months, and how a municipality's private-road grant process took one hour of human work and under ten hours of machine time. The conversation covers cheap everyday use of small models, the risks of model lock-in and of handing organisational memory to a platform, the end of the SaaS user interface, and why professional-services firms that skip the agentic transformation will fall behind. It closes on what happens to human brains when routine moves to the machine: decision fatigue, context switching and the ergonomics of AI.
Helsingin Sanomat journalist Marko Junkkari interviewed about 60 people, from London's mega-funds to Finnish buyout houses, for his book Pääomasijoittajat (Private Equity Investors, Otava 2026). The episode unpacks why the end of zero interest rates froze exits, what continuation funds and zombie funds are, and how the GP–LP structure, management fee, hurdle rate and carried interest work in practice. Junkkari explains how he got Sponsor, Intera and Vaaka to publish their fund returns, and goes through the stories of CapMan, EQT, DevCo Partners and Tesi and the two generations of Finnish venture capital. At the core is a tension: why Finnish pension insurers put tens of billions into American mega-funds while domestic funds stay small and scale-up funding is missing. The episode ends with the solutions on offer, from Tesi's Finland Club to the Swedish model in which individuals direct part of their own pension savings. According to Junkkari the book was commissioned by the industry; Sami Miettinen is himself an LP investor and investment banker. Not investment advice.
Recorded the day after the US midterm elections, Bitcoin specialist Thomas Brand and Sami Miettinen work through the thinking of Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. Brand argues that elections do not change the underlying direction: not the national debt, not the military-industrial complex, and not the distributed consensus machine Yarvin calls the Cathedral. The conversation moves from Bitcoin as money that does not depend on humans to the Dark Enlightenment and the human as a bootloader for an alien intelligence, accelerationism, Roko's basilisk, Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis, Samuel Butler's 1863 warning that machines may treat humans as humans treat horses, Hirschman's exit, voice and loyalty, and why AI threatens the funding base of public finances before anything else.
Valto Loikkanen proposes that every Finn should get access to AI with their library card, with the compute supplied by the under-used LUMI supercomputer in Kajaani. Sami Miettinen and Petri Kajander work through with him why digital sovereignty needs action rather than talk, for individuals, companies and the state alike. The conversation moves from Anthropic's IPO and the security holes AI is exposing to why a coder gets depressed when a machine does his work in a minute and the signalling value of human work disappears. Valto opens up his book Oma tietoekosysteemi (Your own data ecosystem) and argues for keeping your own accumulating knowledge separate from agents and platforms. Finally they consider why a Finnish-language model thinks differently from an English one and what that means for the public sector, regulation and a national language model.
In Russia, power has rarely changed hands through a natural death. Docent Arto Luukkanen goes through the main themes of his book on the brutal history of Russia's transfers of power with Sami Miettinen, from Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great to Lenin, Stalin's terror and Prigozhin's mutiny. The same set-up recurs through the centuries: the tsar, the boyars and the security apparatus on which power rests, whose leader can never show weakness. Along the way they discuss Finland's time as a grand duchy, Snellman's markka, Finlandisation and why the Soviet Union never took Finland. Finally Luukkanen sketches two scenarios for what happens in Russia after Putin.
