Reflections from the past year

Hope you all have had the opportunity to celebrate Christmas with your loved ones. Soon, the year has to come to an end and I would like to share some short reflections from my first year as CEO for Capgemini in the Nordics. It has been an inspiring, fun, challenging, and sometimes tough year, filled with great meetings, collaborations, and celebrations.

I want to start by thanking all my customers, partners and colleagues contributing to another strong year where Capgemini in the Nordics shown resilience and growth in industries such as manufacturing, energy and utilities and life science while kept a stable business in retail. Towards the end of the year, we also seen a positive trends in public across the countries.

1. AI as growth enabler: AI has been a top priority, with discussions on making Nordics more competitive using AI. One of my first meetings in May was a round table with Carl-Henrik Svanberg, Tech Sweden (TechSverige) and industry representatives to discuss how AI can make Sweden more competitive, as we are clearly falling behind, also in Nordics. We all agreed we need both a bold top down strategy and more investment from the government while we continuously need to nurture all the PoC, local initiatives. Today it’s about scale, it’s about meeting the expectations on efficiency gains from the boards but also very critical we all continue experiment and use it in our daily lives. I am very happy to see many concrete suggestions in the AI-kommissionens Färdplan för Sverige re how to strengthen AI development and use in Sweden. Capgemini Nordics is investing heavily in augmenting our AI capabilities across roles. Besides an AI Centre of Excellence working with our innovation lab, we have created and AI academy across all our business lines and installing an AI Award each quarter next year to put the spotlight on both great ideas and our own AI change agents.
2. Generative AI in Nordic Businesses: In our own studies, The Nordic AI frontier – Navigating the generative AI wave among Nordic enterprises and “Gen AI at work – Shaping the future of organizations”, Gen AI is becoming increasingly significant in Swedish and Nordic businesses, influencing everything from direct leadership to onboarding new employees. The Gen AI at work study shows that 65% of managers and leaders believe generative AI allows them to be more strategic, focusing more on decision-making and innovation. Despite this, only 15% use Gen AI tools daily, showing that we all have a responsibility to be role models, learn the technology and ask for help but also set clear demands and goals.
3. Meeting people and creating networks: This summer, I visited Almedalen, an open and democratic meeting place (similar to Arendalsuka in Norway and Folkemødet in Denmark), where I participated in interesting round table discussions and had many spontaneous and important conversations with people connected to energy, AI and leadership. Through our podcast “Keys to Intelligent Industry”, co-hosted with Fredrik Gunnarsson we meet CXOs such as Ödgärd Andersson, CEO of Zenseact, and Annika Ölme, CTO of SKF Group and many more across different industries and roles, all with a passion for change and the intersection between business and technology.
4. Investing in our people: Despite challenges, we have continued to invest in our people, earning awards and recognitions throughout the Nordics. For example, Capgemini Sweden ranked 7th in the Universum Best Employer Survey. This success is due to our dedicated and passionate employees. In 2025, we will keep investing in our people for continuous development and learning in the Nordic region. Especially in areas like SAP, data, ai, cloud, software engineers and transformational capabilities.
5. A Sustainable Future: Capgemini as a group and in the Nordics, has a very bold ambition in terms of sustainability and to support our clients with the same. We hosted the Capgemini Nordic Sustainability Tech Award, celebrating innovative technology solutions for a sustainable future. Congratulations to all participants, finalists, and winners (Altum Technologies, Mölnlycke, Lyras and Finnfjord). We are all winners in the mission to save the planet.

More minutes of daylight

As 2024 ends, the winter solstice has brought more daylight each day, symbolizing a positive future. Take time to reflect and enjoy the daylight.

Thank you to all clients and partners for our achievements in 2024. I am looking forward to many more exciting meetings and strong partnerships in 2025. AI and continued critical technology investments like in cloud will not only continue push the boundaries of automation and efficiency but also generate new revenue streams, create new products and services and for all of us be another year of new learnings.

It’s a privilege to be part of this change.