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Expert insights on digitalisation, AI and modern software development.

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How AI streamlines software version updates

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Article August 27, 2026

How AI streamlines software version updates

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

AI makes software version updates a more systematic and efficient process, where identifying, implementing, and validating changes can be automated. It also changes the starting point for clearing accumulated update debt: outdated technologies can be brought up to date faster and more cost-effectively, even when updates have been postponed for a long time.

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CTO AI Corner June 11, 2026

CTO AI Corner: Why your company won't get the real benefits of AI

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I've run quite a few AI use case discovery workshops with customers, and one pattern keeps appearing. Most of the use cases people come up with focus on cost savings. The problem is that this rarely creates a significant competitive advantage.

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Article June 9, 2026

How does the system keep pace with changes in the business?

Jaakko Törmänen

Service Manager

The value of a system isn't just derived from the fact that it's built and put into use. True value is often measured only during use: how well the system withstands changes, supports day-to-day work, responds to new needs, and remains reliable even as the surrounding business environment, technology, and user expectations evolve. That is why maintenance should not be viewed merely as troubleshooting or technical support. At its best, a maintenance model is a framework for the system's continuous development. It ensures that the system is properly maintained, but also that it can be developed in a controlled, appropriate, and timely manner.

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CTO AI Corner May 21, 2026

CTO AI Corner: Laziness breaks AI

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Humans are surprisingly good at working in imperfect environments. We adapt to broken processes, missing documentation, unclear requirements, and that one spreadsheet everyone is afraid to touch. We know when to make an educated guess and when to ask for clarification. Most importantly, we usually understand our own limitations. AI does not work like that.

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Article May 19, 2026

Quality assurance as a service supports AI-driven development

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

The AI revolution and the democratization of software development have transformed the way many companies build tools. Increasingly, new tools and applications are being built by the people who best understand the business needs. This is a huge opportunity for companies. Ideas can be tested faster, internal processes can be automated more nimbly, and solutions can be developed right where they’re actually needed. At the same time, however, we must determine how to ensure that software produced with the help of artificial intelligence remains secure, reliable, and maintainable in the long term.

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CTO AI Corner May 15, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How to manage rising AI service costs?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

While many companies are still trying to get employees to use more AI, some are already starting to see surprisingly large monthly AI bills. Funny how quickly “innovation” becomes “please explain this invoice.” The biggest problem is that most companies still do not actually know what kind of value they are getting from AI. They track utilization percentages and know how people use the tools, but rarely calculate how much business value they get for every dollar spent. That is where the discussion often goes off track.

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CTO AI Corner May 6, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How much does data quality matter for AI services?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

For a long time in machine learning, one truth has been repeated almost like a mantra: data quality is everything. In many cases, the first step in any project has been to clean and structure the data before even attempting a solution. But I am starting to question whether that still holds with modern general-purpose AI models.

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Podcast May 4, 2026

AI Flow Talks: The AI Revolution in Business

Our AI Flow Talks podcast series shares real-life stories from the world of AI to help organizations navigate their AI transformation more easily. In this episode, we examine the AI revolution from the perspectives of business and IT services. In the discussion, Fluentia CEO Sami Vaskuri and Siili Solutions’ CEO Tomi Pienimäki analyze how AI transformation affects IT services and what current and future impacts it has on companies’ business operations.

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Article April 20, 2026

Role-specific AI expertise delivers the greatest benefits to organizations

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Organizations derive the greatest benefits from AI when expertise is developed on a role-by-role basis. When training is tailored to specific job requirements, what is learned is immediately put into practice. Product owners learn to directly leverage AI in producing specifications, and quality assurance professionals gain a concrete understanding of test generation and analysis. As people in different roles learn to leverage artificial intelligence in their specific work, tasks take less time, decision-making is more data-driven, and teams’ working methods become more consistent and clear.

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Podcast April 10, 2026

AI Flow Talks: AI & Leadership – How to successfully lead AI transformation

Our AI Flow Talks podcast series shares real-life stories from the world of AI to make the AI transformation easier for organizations. In this episode, Fluentia CEO Sami Vaskuri talks with seasoned executive Jani Leppänen about leading the AI transformation. Leppänen has over 30 years of experience in building and leading organizations, and currently heads Vaisto.ai, helping companies navigate the AI transformation, particularly from a human perspective.

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CTO AI Corner April 9, 2026

CTO AI Corner: Humans should not always be responsible for what AI does

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I know, I know. I have said dozens of times in my training sessions that developers are always responsible for the code they create using AI. But lately, I have started to question whether that always needs to be true.

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CTO AI Corner March 19, 2026

CTO AI Corner: Your industry is not special – how AI is transforming every field

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

The conversations around me seem to be full of confident explanations about why AI will not disrupt "this one industry." Apparently, every industry believes it is the exception. Let’s look at some of the arguments.

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Article March 16, 2026

Here's how a company's own AI agents act as emcees and streamline operations

Sami Koivisto

Solution Architect

Are your specialists spending all their time on endless menial tasks and jumping from one assignment to the next? Is your company’s tacit knowledge leaking to competitors or disappearing with retiring employees? Is your current AI assistant a bit clueless and impractical in real-world work? In this blog, we’ll explain how more comprehensive AI agents tailored to your company can improve your organization’s operational capabilities and support its growth.

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CTO AI Corner February 26, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How is AI changing custom software maintenance?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

In professional software maintenance, automation has always been part of the setup. Still, many tasks have traditionally been left to humans. Things like resolving incidents or analyzing whether a reported vulnerability from a security scanner actually affects our systems. AI is starting to change maintenance work in several ways, but I see two major areas where it really makes a difference: analyzing situations for humans and automating new parts of service operations.

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Article February 17, 2026

AI-enhanced software development – the benefits of an AI-native operating model

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Artificial intelligence is widely used in software development today. In practice, however, "AI-powered development" means very different things to different companies and service providers – for some, it means a range of tools for developers' everyday work, while for others, it is a series of separate experiments. In this blog, we will explain what AI-based development is like when it is a strategic part of the entire operating model.

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CTO AI Corner January 30, 2026

CTO AI Corner: AI is changing software quality assurance

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

As AI becomes more integrated into software development, it inevitably changes quality assurance as well. Implementation speed increases, releases happen faster, and suddenly testing and validation feel like they are running on a treadmill set by someone else. If we do not evolve QA alongside development, we are just creating a brand new bottleneck.

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Podcast January 22, 2026

AI Flow Talks: Euro-sovereign artificial intelligence

Our AI Flow Talks podcast series shares real-life stories from the world of AI to make AI transformation easier for organizations. This episode delves into European AI sovereignty, technological dependence, and the rapidly changing operating environment. The guest on this episode is Mikko Alasaarela, who discusses these topics with Tomi Leppälahti, AI Director at Fluentia. Mikko is the founder of the Agentics Finland community and Agion, who works at the forefront of the AI revolution and agent-based automation.

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CTO AI Corner January 22, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How is AI changing the role of Product Owner?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

AI tools are quietly reshaping what it means to be a Product Owner. Traditionally, many POs have focused on gathering business requirements and prioritizing them for technical teams. They have acted as translators between stakeholders and developers, which has often meant long feedback loops and plenty of ambiguity at the start. AI changes this.

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CTO AI Corner January 20, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How is AI changing the role of the software architect?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Most software architects are generalists, especially in consulting. Industries and technology stacks change constantly, and architects rely heavily on accumulated experience to design workable solutions in unfamiliar contexts. One long standing challenge has been domain knowledge. When every project comes from a different industry, there is always a learning curve at the start. AI has made this much easier.

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Article January 20, 2026

Manage software version updates in a modern way with artificial intelligence

Kyösti Puro

Senior Software Developer

It is common for companies to have some of their software lagging behind the development of the technologies used in them. For example, applications based on React or Django may be functionally sound but use outdated versions. This type of technical debt increases risks and complicates development work. The principles of legacy system modernization can also be applied to version updates – and bring significant value to organizations. Fluentia utilizes an AI-based modernization model for this purpose.

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CTO AI Corner January 15, 2026

CTO AI Corner: Do we need a new role – AI tool engineer?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I will continue my post series on how AI is changing the roles in software development. This time, I want to propose a new role: AI tool engineer. Let me elaborate.

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CTO AI Corner January 13, 2026

CTO AI Corner: How is AI changing the role of software developer?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Over the past few years I have had a front row seat watching how AI has already reshaped the developer role. And the change is clearly not done yet. More and more code is written by AI, and developers are shifting from writing code to guiding AI. We tell the AI what to do, review the output, adjust the instructions, and repeat until it works. This alone has already changed the job significantly.

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CTO AI Corner January 7, 2026

CTO AI Corner: What changes does the new year bring to software development roles?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I thought I would start the year by taking a moment to reflect on how software development roles are changing because of AI. Some existing roles will face fairly significant changes, and new ones will almost certainly appear. The job titles might stay the same, but the expectations probably will not.

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CTO AI Corner December 10, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Have you considered the risks that AI implementations can cause to your business?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Most companies are already leaning heavily on AI. It is in customer-facing web applications, in internal processes, and quietly lurking in dozens of other places. The AI sector moves fast. Fast enough that not all controls can keep up. Not legal controls, not data protection controls, not security controls, and certainly not technical controls. So, what happens when the AI is no longer available? Or when the information you pass to an AI service leaks? These are real risks that should be considered and mitigated.

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Article November 18, 2025

Modernizing legacy systems is a strategic investment in the future

Jussi Kontiokari

COO

Outdated systems slow down organizations' ability to improve their business and take advantage of automation. Modernizing systems to meet today's requirements is not just a technical upgrade, but an opportunity to grow and improve business efficiency. Typical technologies to be modernized include COBOL, RPG, PHP, Visual Basic and other legacy languages that no longer meet current development and integration requirements.

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CTO AI Corner November 7, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Autonomous AI teams?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how autonomous AI teams could actually work, and what’s keeping us from building them for real, not just in demo videos.

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CTO AI Corner October 27, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Role boundaries in software development are starting to melt thanks to AI

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

For quite a while, roles in software development have been pretty static and nicely siloed. POs gathered business requirements and turned them into tasks. Designers used tools like Figma to create visuals that developers later implemented. DevOps handled CI/CD pipelines. Testers tested. Everyone knew their lane. But in the age of AI, those neat boundaries are starting to look less practical.

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Podcast October 23, 2025

AI Flow Talks: The true capabilities and limitations of AI

Our AI Flow Talks podcast series shares real-life stories from the world of AI to make AI transformation easier for organisations. In this episode, we discuss the true capabilities of AI and its limitations - what AI can really do today, and where its limits still lie. Our guest is Esa Alhoniemi from Inoi, a data analytics specialist and AI expert. The discussion will be led by Tomi Leppälahti, AI Director at Fluentia.

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Article October 15, 2025

Partnership with UpCloud brings Fluentia customers a cloud platform built on European data sovereignty

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

Fluentia and UpCloud, a leading European cloud computing company headquartered in Helsinki, have entered into a strategic partnership. The partnership will provide Fluentia's customers with access to UpCloud's state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure, which offers speed, reliability and cost-effectiveness.

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Article October 6, 2025

Growth award winner Fluentia expands – data company Valensis joins the family

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

Fluentia, which has enjoyed strong growth in recent years, strengthens its position by adding data house Valensis to its family of companies. Together, the companies will provide customers with intelligent and comprehensive digital solutions that connect systems, data and artificial intelligence to support business growth and transformation.

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CTO AI Corner October 2, 2025

CTO AI Corner: When AI gets stuck – teaching agents to debug themselves

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Do you remember when developers would spend days wrestling with a cryptic bug, making zero progress and developing a close personal relationship with the rubber duck? AI gets stuck in a similar way. It pokes at things at random, occasionally fixes one issue, and quietly breaks three others while trying to get unstuck. As agents become more autonomous and run longer tasks, this may be one of the most important problems to solve.

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CTO AI Corner September 25, 2025

CTO AI Corner: How can you make AI follow your project’s coding style?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Most of us know the feeling. The AI spits out decent code, but then you realize it doesn’t match your project’s conventions. Worse, its own style shifts every few prompts. So, what can you actually do about it?

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Article September 18, 2025

AI as a driver of software modernization – enhancing every step of the process

Sami Koivisto

Solution Architect

Updating systems is an unavoidable expense, but also an opportunity to improve efficiency and competitiveness. The key question is whether to replace the system with a new one or modernise the old one. Building new is often costly and slow, and modernisation has never been simpler before. AI changes the situation: it allows modernisation to be faster, more accurate and more cost-effective. In this blog, we look at how AI can be used at different stages of software modernization.

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CTO AI Corner September 18, 2025

CTO AI Corner: What are the basic guardrails you should have in place when doing AI enhanced development?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Usually, the AI plays nice when helping you develop software. But every now and then, in rare moments, it might do something catastrophic. So how do you protect yourself?

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CTO AI Corner September 16, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Can you use AI agents in software quality assurance?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

AI has already changed the way we write code. But can it help ensure that code is actually good? I’m not talking about writing automation tests, that’s a given. I’m talking about agents that actively analyze code, point out problems, and offer actionable feedback. After a year of experimenting with QA agents, here are some lessons learned the hard way.

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CTO AI Corner September 12, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Should you read all the code generated by AI?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Humans are still the number one bottleneck in software development. Even if AI generates code automatically in the background based on tickets, someone still needs to write those tickets. Someone still needs to validate and test the results. But do we really need to check every line of code manually? Or could we start trusting parts of it?

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CTO AI Corner September 10, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Can you afford the maintenance costs of AI-developed software?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Conventional wisdom holds that AI-enhanced development raises maintenance costs. You know… with glued-on copy-paste code that nobody understands and such. And I’ve seen that it can be so.

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Podcast September 2, 2025

AI Flow Talks: Building AI capabilities in organizations

Our AI Flow Talks podcast series shares real-life stories from the world of AI to make AI transformation easier for organisations. In this episode (in Finnish), Fluentia's AI Director Tomi Leppälahti talks to Jussi Ahola, a long-time AI expert at data house Valensis, about the AI capabilities of organisations. The discussion focuses on how companies at different stages can build their AI capabilities and what pitfalls to avoid along the way.

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Article August 26, 2025

Fluentia is now an official "AI 1000: Growth from AI" training partner

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

We are a certified AI 1000: Growth from AI training partner. As part of a programme coordinated by AI Finland, we offer tailored training for business leaders and governments to help Finnish organisations use AI as a strategic tool to boost growth, competitiveness and exports.

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Article August 13, 2025

AI workshops: from idea to prototype in a day

Jussi Kontiokari

COO

In many companies, there is currently a backlog of AI use cases – the needs have been identified, and it is clear which parts of the business could benefit from more efficient and streamlined processes, but few, if any, concrete implementations have yet been made. Our AI workshops allow customers to work on these needs and ideas together with our AI experts and refine them from ideas into solutions.

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CTO AI Corner August 11, 2025

CTO AI Corner: If AI produces bad code, it’s your own fault

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

I’m a bit tired of hearing people bash AI because it didn’t produce something they liked. Most of these critics have used AI-assisted development a handful of times, decided it was useless, and are now on a mission to warn the world that AI will make codebases unmaintainable, insecure, and riddled with bugs. But maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t the tool.

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CTO AI Corner August 6, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Is software development a craft or an industry?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Software engineering is still a young industry. Processes are light, metrics are scarce, and the product's quality depends far too much on the team you happen to draw from the hat. In other words, we live in a craft-guild culture where results sometimes come down to dice rolls. Enter artificial intelligence, steadily rewriting the rules.

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CTO AI Corner July 30, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Why prompt engineering is overrated in its current form?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Everywhere you look, there are prompt engineering guides, courses, and videos preaching rules and formulas. And yes, they mostly work. But here’s why I think it's overrated.

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CTO AI Corner June 18, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Scrum feels out of place in AI enhanced software development

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Lately, I’ve had several conversations about development frameworks, especially in greenfield projects. The impact of AI tools is significant enough that our ways of working need to evolve too. Scrum, in particular, seems to have some trouble keeping up, so here are a few thoughts for discussion.

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Podcast June 17, 2025

AI Flow Talks: AI enhanced software development transforms workflows and processes

AI Flow Talks tells real stories from the world of AI to make AI transformation easier for organizations. The first episode (in Finnish) delves into the practices and impacts of AI-enhanced software development with Fluentia's AI Director Tomi Leppälahti and Lastbot's CTO Pasi Vuorio.

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CTO AI Corner June 16, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Smaller teams make more sense in an AI enhanced development world

Tomi Leppälahti

Tomi Leppälahti

Tomi Leppälahti

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

One common challenge I see when coaching AI tools in different organizations is unexpected resistance to change—even from developers who usually embrace new technologies. Some of the most innovative engineers hesitate to take the AI tooling leap. So how can we make AI-assisted development feel safe, inspiring, and rewarding?

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CTO AI Corner March 20, 2025

CTO AI Corner: How to design AI-friendly architectures?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Let’s face it – AI struggles with complex monolithic applications. When the same terminology appears in dozens of places across the codebase, automated context-picking gets confused. And when dependency or call chains become too long, AI can't track them efficiently while debugging or generating new functionality. In this post I discuss AI's limitations and possible solutions.

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Article March 19, 2025

Claim: Coders are made to code, not to babble business jargon. True or false?

Sami Koivisto

Solution Architect

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Antti Pikkarainen

Project Lead

All industries are associated with different claims or at least certain perceptions, and IT is no exception. We decided to debug the situation and start a series of articles going through them one by one. In this blog, we look at the role of developers in interpreting business needs.

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CTO AI Corner March 17, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Leveraging semi-tacit knowledge with AI

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Organizations hold vast amounts of undocumented knowledge – information that exists but isn’t captured in official documentation. Even when some of it is recorded, it often resides in informal channels rather than structured repositories. In this post I discuss how to harness this existing Q&A data when implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models to power AI agents that assist employees with questions about processes and best practices.

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CTO AI Corner March 12, 2025

CTO AI Corner: Does using AI tools weaken programming skills?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

There’s an ongoing discussion, especially concerning junior developers, about whether AI-assisted coding hinders skill development. However, even experienced developers have shared concerns about their routine programming abilities deteriorating when relying heavily on AI. I’d break programming skills into two key areas in this discussion. The first is logical thinking and understanding technologies. The second is remembering precise syntax and developing muscle memory for writing code efficiently.

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Podcast February 7, 2025

AI-powered software modernisation

In this podcast, we discuss our AI-powered software modernisation for a financial services client.

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Article November 12, 2024

What lies beneath of a successful project?

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

Let's return for a moment to the basics that ultimately determine the success of each project.

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Article September 10, 2024

Fluentia selected for Yle's – The Finnish Broadcasting Company – framework agreement as part of the Digital Expert Alliance

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

Small digital businesses join forces to participate in Yle's socially significant framework agreement.

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Article June 17, 2024

What is hybrid low-code software development and how can you use it?

Tomi Leppälahti

CAIO & CTO

Have you been excited about the benefits of Low-Code solutions in software development - the speed of development and lower costs, but then encountered its limitations? You're probably not the only one. But with hybrid Low-Code development - combining the best of traditional software development and Low-Code development - you can overcome the challenges you face.

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Article May 8, 2024

When it all goes wrong - three tips for better software development projects

Sami Koivisto

Solution Architect

Iiro Rantanen

Senior Software Developer

Rami Rahikkala

Senior Software Developer

It's nice to tell stories of success to others, who wouldn't like that. But what happens when things don't go like clockwork? It feels a lot harder to share when things go very south indeed. But they say that you learn from everything. We have come to the same conclusion, and in this blog post we decided to share some of the challenging situations we have encountered and the lessons learned.

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Webinar April 18, 2024

Hybrid Low-Code software development for large-scale solutions

Learn how to combine Low-Code and traditional development in complex solutions. Watch our experts' tips and our customers' experiences in the webinar recording.

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Article January 19, 2024

Is AI useful in the day-to-day work of software development?

Melina Virtanen

Marketing

Last year at the latest brought AI, its potential and its exploitation to the forefront of debate in every sector. Beyond the exploitation, the debate around the challenges, limitations and other issues to be considered in AI continues to be heated. At Fluentia, AI-related practices are under review and guidance is constantly evolving. So what does AI mean in software development – is it really useful, and if so, in what areas? However, do the "hallucinations" found in AI harm the outcome of the work? We decided to talk to our experienced software developers Henri and Risto, who use AI in their work every day.

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