CEO blog: The third wave – and why nothing will be the same
We are living through a great rupture, one that is reshaping our industry, business, and everyday life in ways that are hard to fully grasp. Here are some of our CEO Ossi Talvitie’s thoughts and conclusions.
In 2017 I became a software entrepreneur by acquiring a company with nearly 30 years of experience building lifecycle management solutions for valuable assets. Experienced people, great customers, and software that was, and in many cases still is, genuinely state of the art in efficiency, transparency and competitiveness.
But I came in with an agenda. The first thing I wanted to change was connectivity.
What if the devices being maintained could simply talk? Tell you what’s wrong, how long they’ve been running, what software version they’re carrying, whether something had changed? We built that. The second thing was flexibility. I wanted to bring to industrial lifecycle management what the best IT tools already offered, solutions where customers could fully configure the tool to match their own processes, improve it as their thinking evolved, and eventually connect it seamlessly to the devices themselves. No rigid structures. No forced workflows. We built that too. I thought those two waves were the story. I was wrong. The last years have made it very clear: there is a third factor I did not foresee. Bigger than the first two combined.
Large language models and generative AI are not just new tools. They are fundamentally changing how we work, how we expect software to behave, and how industrial operations will function. And they are doing it fast. Here is the shift I keep coming back to: nobody wants a software tool where the most valuable person in the room is the one who knows how to use it.
We have all watched this happen in software development first. Programming is becoming less about how to build something in C++, C# or React, and more about why it exists, who uses it, and what problem it actually solves. The technical execution is increasingly handled by AI. Human value is moving upstream; toward understanding, judgment, and vision. But this is not a story about developers. This wave will run through every industry. This is not a wave you can wait out. Companies that don’t fundamentally change the way they think, operate and serve their customers won’t survive the next one to two years The third wave is here. The question is whether we ride it or wait for it to pass.
– Ossi Talvitie, CEO
