In September 2025, we hosted an AI-devs gathering in collaboration with Symposium AI. Symposium's monthly in-person events are unique opportunities for AI professionals to share practical know‑how, spark big ideas, and ask how technology will change our society. We, at Reaktor, were happy to act as hosts in the event, which included dinner, two engaging presentations on AI products, and time for networking between AI enthusiasts, AI developers, and AI startup members.
Symposium AI is a Finnish community of AI builders. They host monthly face-to-face events to share the latest related to AI. After some Reaktorians were invited to Symposium events in other locations, it didn't take long for Reaktor and Symposium to host one of those monthly events at Reaktor's premises in Helsinki.
The real value of these in-person events, apart from the human connections you can make, resides in being able to discuss topics that might be too sensitive to share publicly, but open enough to share in a closed event. This is exactly what Tuomas Lounamaa, lead at Symposium AI, expressed in his recap of our event.
The first presentation of the night was by our very own Saku Suuriniemi. He shared learnings from our work together with ABB. For ABB we created an AI-powered RFQ-handling software called Specifier. It is used to save time in the manual routine work of extracting technical requirements from specification documents and filling in the requirements to configure ABB products to offer. AI is used to assess PDF document similarities and suggest imports of requirements from earlier related documents.
Saku shared two key learnings from the project:
- Always keep the human on the driverʼs seat
- Only boring technology in the stack, please
In essence, he argued:
- AI is fallible, and humans should have the final say
- AI system findings should be suggestions, not final decisions
- AI system findings should be inspectable and overridable
- A simple, stable, and tried tech stack is much more valuable for business cases than innovative, shiny, but unstable tech stacks (which abound in our AI-hyped world)
The second presentation was by Kalle Niemi, from Inven AI. Inven AI is Finland's fastest-growing AI startup. They specialize in B2B services, allowing businesses to perform AI-powered searches on other companies' presence, insights, and data. Kalle dove deep into the algorithm that powers these searches and expounded on real use cases as well as the reasons why their clients use their services.
After the presentations and engaging Q&As, it was time to network. As well as pleasant and insightful conversations, the gathered AI enthusiasts enjoyed the stunning terrace views of central Helsinki from the office's sixth floor, and the steaming sauna, which was open to all participants – the mood was delightful. Both Symposium AI and I agree: it was an unforgettable evening, and we will surely want to repeat it in the future!
