with Karoliina Partanen

Over the past decade, Karoliina has led pretty much every department of Sulava. We talk careers, cottages, and OpenAI.

So, what do you do around here?

I work at Sulava as Chief Future Scientist (CFS). This means I’m leading our efforts to meet the new demands of the cloud services market. The future of work life is in the metaverse – my job is to figure out how to commercialize it.

At the moment, I’m most excited about OpenAI. It can help our clients in so many ways, but there’s a lot of work to be done discovering all these possibilities.

When did your career really get going?

I’ve been lucky to have a new career at Sulava every second year! When I joined in 2012, I learnt the basics as a social media consultant. Then I did my 10,000 hours of practice to become an intranet expert, eventually leading the business in this area. Since then, I’ve led our employee and customer experiences as CXO, our marketing as CMO, and now our future offerings as CFS. Meanwhile, I’ve had two kids and briefly worked in management consulting at another company. Being away for a while definitely gives you perspective and renews your thinking.

That’s quite the CV. What’s your biggest project right now?

It’s an internal development project to commercialize the best innovations from my brilliant colleagues.

Moving away from work, where’s your favorite holiday destination?

I visited over 40 countries before the realities of climate change hit me. Now my family only does one short-haul flight every three years and one long-haul every seven. We recently bought a summer cottage 33 km away from home. That’s now my happy place.

Very jealous! This year we want to increase knowledge sharing in the Neighborhood. What can you teach people?

I’ve been very lucky recently to be involved in a transformation project, where we learnt how to measure and forecast our business to improve all our processes. I believe I could help other companies going through something similar.

To be honest, I would also love to meet my neighbors just for a chat. These encounters are always a highlight of my workdays!

Lovely stuff. How can people get in touch?

I prefer Teams but email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram… They all work!