There are moments at events when you realise the conversation you came to have is no longer the most important one in the room. TalTech Business Forum was one of those moments. I joined the opening panel right after Rector Tiit Land’s keynote, together with Kristjan Kukk and Indrek Seppo, to discuss “The Age of AI: Intelligence or Illusion?” It’s a big question. One, we thought we were there to explore. But quite quickly, it became clear that the real answer wasn’t on the stage. It was sitting in the audience.
The audience that changed the perspective
Looking out into the room, nearly half of the audience were soon-to-be graduates. We asked a simple question: who has used AI? Almost every hand went up. Then another: who has built something with it? A surprising number of hands stayed up. Agents, bots, experiments. Around 10% had already moved from using AI to shaping it. In that moment, something shifted for me. TalTech is not only about IT. The IT students are outnumbered by students from other fields like construction engineering, economics, business, and administration.
We often talk about AI as something that organisations need to “prepare for.” But this generation isn’t preparing. They are already living in it. And in many ways, their practical experience is ahead of where our conversations still are.
Not “how to use AI”, but “why do anything at all?”
For younger generations, using AI is not a question. It’s not even a topic. It’s a baseline. What they are curious about is something else entirely:
What should we build?
What actually matters?
What is worth doing?
This is where I believe the conversation needs to move. Because if we only use AI to do the same things faster, we are simply accelerating the existing system. Yet, we are not necessarily making the biggest possible shift. And acceleration without direction is not progress.
Beyond replacement
Ask “why” before “how”. What problem are we actually solving? Is it still worth solving in the same way? Making wrong decisions faster or performing more wrong tasks faster is not what we are aiming for, right? A lot of the discussion around AI is framed through replacement. What will AI take over? Which roles will disappear?
That’s an important question, but not the most interesting one. The more interesting question is: what becomes possible now that wasn’t before?
We briefly touched on an example that sounds almost poetic, translating animal and bird language into Estonian. It may sound far away, but it captures something essential. AI is not only about doing human tasks faster. It’s about expanding beyond human limitations. Yes, replacement will happen. Especially in areas where there is data and where speed matters. But expansion is where the real shift lies. AI will not only change how we work. It will change what is possible to work on at all.
A different kind of leadership conversation
The next day in the forum, I listened to the leadership and innovation panel with Jaanus Vihand, Ursel Velve, and Agnes Roos. It was one of those discussions that felt grounded. Not theoretical, but lived. Ursel shared openly about leading a major transformation and downsizing. Not as a finished story, but as something still ongoing. What stood out to me was her honesty about the challenge and focus on the need for clarity. She mentioned that in the middle of that change, she reached out to Moticheck to help get teams aligned and communication flowing. She was very mindful about what she brings to the table for the future, not the past experiences, but attitude, desirea and personality to unlock the future. That resonated with many, as transformation is never just about structure. It’s about people trying to understand what’s happening around them, and quite often without enough visibility. And without that visibility, even experienced leaders are left guessing.
There were also moments of simple clarity in the discussion. “A leader should not believe everything they think. It’s a trap,” said Jaanus Vihand. “No innovation comes without ambition,” added Agnes Roos. Short sentences. But they stay with you. My takeaway from this panel was that leadership is not certainty, it’s awareness. In times of change, leaders don’t need more confidence. They need better visibility into reality.
What AI ultimately gives us
At the end of our panel, there was a final question: What will AI give us?
There were many possible answers: speed, efficiency, scale. But the answer that came to me was simple: Time.
And the older I get, the more I feel how valuable that actually is. Time with people whose thinking you respect. Time for conversations that don’t have an immediate output. Time to pause, reflect, and understand. If I sit down for 30 minutes with someone and ask for their perspective, that time is incredibly valuable. More valuable, in many ways, than the parallel work a machine can produce in the background. Because human experience is not scalable. And that’s exactly why it becomes more valuable.
Final reflection
Walking away from TalTech, one thought stayed with me. The next generation is not waiting for the future of AI. They are already living in it. For the rest of us, the question is no longer whether AI will change how we work. It already has. The real question is, what do we choose to do with the time it gives us?
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