I wrote my first lines of AI code at 13 on a home computer—little did I know I was joining the earliest wave of AI natives. By 17 I’d launched a startup building intelligent inventory systems so small retailers always knew what was on their shelves before their accountants did—a lesson that stuck: technology matters when it solves a human problem.
Stockholm shaped that conviction. A master’s in AI from KTH Royal Institute of Technology gave me the technical backbone, and a psychology degree from Stockholm University taught me to study human intelligence, emotion, and behaviour as blueprints for engineering their artificial counterpart. When the Swedish AI Society honoured my early multi-agent robotics work with its national award in 1999, I was proud—and even more driven. Serving later as the Society’s Vice-President reinforced a belief that Nordic research and innovation can steer the global AI agenda.
Since then, my career has spanned Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. An AI PhD and adjunct professorship deepened the science; back in Sweden I co-founded and exited ventures in digital health and life science. Leading global AI divisions—spanning engineering, product, and commercial teams—taught me how to turn deep tech into durable business value.
Today my passion shows up on two fronts:
- Hands-on, Nordic-style operational leadership—open, egalitarian, outcome-driven—inside deep-tech organisations, and
- Board-level, investor, and startup advising on sovereign AI, quantum, fusion energy, and space tech strategy
What I’m executing now:
- AI × Quantum – driving the fusion pragmatically. Advancing hybrid classical–quantum workflows for pharmaceutical modelling and optimisation, in concert with European HPC and quantum ecosystems.
- Multi-agent systems – from research to practice. Speaking and advising on MAS design, security, and governance, including sessions at the OECD Summit and Rise of AI Summit (Berlin), with a focus on robust tool use, belief revision, and agent-to-agent trust.
- Sovereignty by design – stack and policy. As Founding Executive Director of the Nordic AI Institute (since 2017), advising boards, investors, and ministries on strategies that align capability, infrastructure, and governance across the European stack.
I also keep my inner operating system healthy—hiking the archipelago, meditating by Lake Mälaren, and drawing inspiration from Stockholm’s cultural gems, from Fotografiska to the Nobel Prize Museum. Conversations with visiting Nobel laureates each December remind me that great ideas thrive where nature, art, and science intersect.
From agents to qubits—let’s make Europe the place where the future is compiled.
