Kipinä Turns 5! An AI-capable community is built on trust, not technology

Artificial IntelligenceCommunityCustomer experience

April 1

04 | 2026 Olli Laine, CEO & Co-founder

The founding agreement for Kipinä Software was signed five years ago today. It’s a good time to pause and reflect on how it all began.

In April 2021, the two of us sat down at a table and wrote down four core beliefs. They weren’t about technology, market share, or revenue targets. They were about people.

We believed that a strong team performs best. That the best professionals are drawn to places where they are respected. That customers want experts who are thriving and committed. And that purpose and work-life balance aren’t just empty words, but the very core of our business.

These beliefs gave rise to Kipinä Software. Now, five years later, we have 40 experienced experts, extremely satisfied customers (NPS 9.2), and B Corp certification. But the numbers aren’t what matter most. What matters most is how we got here—and why it’s more relevant than ever.

Community first, strategy second

In Kipinä’s early years, we made a conscious decision that still sounds counterintuitive to many: we didn’t set numerical goals or OKRs, nor did we draw up a detailed strategy.

Instead, we focused on psychological safety, building values, and community. The first two years were a time for values and trust. In the third year, the focus shifted to developing expertise and collaborative decision-making. It wasn’t until the fourth year that we began discussing market changes and how we would respond to them. And only now, in the fifth year, are we working on our strategy. What kind of Kipinä is ready for an unknown future?

This may sound like a slow way to build a business. But when you look at the results, it was the fastest way to build a sustainable foundation. We grew from two people to 40 experts. That wasn’t due to luck. It was because we built the community first.

A strategy without trust is just a piece of paper. Trust without a strategy is already a community capable of almost anything.

Artificial intelligence does not make expert work any easier

I talk a lot about artificial intelligence—it’s part of our daily routine at Kipinä. 100 percent of our projects utilize artificial intelligence in some way. Together, we’ve built best practices for agent-based development, we continuously train our team and our clients—and we develop software using an agent-based approach. We have AI Lead Engineer roles and local LLM solutions that we’re driving forward in our client pipeline.

But the more I work with artificial intelligence, the more convinced I become of one thing: artificial intelligence doesn’t make expert work easier. It makes it more demanding.

Take a moment to think about how the value of an expert has traditionally been defined. An expert was someone who knew. Someone with experience, who could answer questions, who mastered the subject matter. Now, knowledge and problem-solving skills are often available to everyone in seconds. Claude answers most questions faster and more comprehensively than any of us.

Going forward, a person’s worth will really come down to one thing: Can I do better than average? Because agents are already doing an better job than we are at handling average work and thinking. That’s a fact we shouldn’t try to ignore.

As experts and as a community, what will matter most going forward is simply how we can be the best versions of ourselves and thrive. If we do mediocre work while exhausted, it will be difficult to justify our value. Our only task is to strive for better—as individuals and as a team. This means deep thinking, creativity, the courage to question, the ability to ask the right questions, interaction, and the human judgment to discern what data is worth believing and what is not.

This is a paradox that every organization is grappling with right now. And this is precisely where leadership comes into play.

The New Role of Leadership

In a rapidly changing world (doesn't that sound great? But right now, maybe that's exactly what we need), a leader's job isn't to know everything. A leader's job is to create an environment where people feel safe to try new things and say:

"I don't know, but let's figure it out together."

"This didn't work, but we learned from it."

"I need help."

This sounds simple. But in practice, it demands more from a leader than traditional expert-led management ever did. It requires vulnerability—the ability to show that you don’t know everything either. It requires the ability to let go of control and trust that the community will carry the load. It requires the patience to give people room to grow, even when pressures call for speed.

At Kipinä, we don’t measure leadership success by how efficient we are. We measure it by psychological safety, well-being, and whether people feel comfortable being themselves.

And this is where team entrepreneurship is key. Here, everyone is a partner and a decision-maker. No hierarchical structures, no individual-based compensation models. Leading this—ensuring that the team can consistently be the best version of itself—is, in my view, the most important leadership task of the future. And I believe that in team entrepreneurship, this is possible in a unique way. When we commit and invest, we also share the returns together. When people are genuine owners, the motivation to do better comes from within, not from outside.

What Learning Really Takes

There is a lot of talk about "continuous learning" and "embracing new ideas." Every organization talks about lifelong learning and retraining. But rarely is there any discussion of what learning actually requires.

It requires safety.

People don’t learn in an environment where they fear failure. People won’t try new things if making a mistake means punishment or losing face. People learn in an environment where failure is allowed—even encouraged—because it’s a sign that someone tried something new.

At Kipinä, this is clearly evident. We have a strategy that we have developed and refined together, which underscores that community and interpersonal skills are at the heart of our success. In addition, we have a shared code of conduct for collaboration that addresses not only technical processes but also how we interact with one another. Our competency development model balances technical skills and people skills—because in the age of AI, people skills are what distinguish a good team from an excellent one. And we regularly measure both physical and mental well-being, because well-being is not a bonus but a prerequisite.

The path to learning goes like this: safety breeds curiosity. Curiosity breeds experimentation. Experimentation breeds learning. And learning breeds change. But it all starts with safety. Without it, nothing else works.

When the Heart Meets Data

I’m telling you all this because I believe it doesn’t just apply to software companies. It applies to every organization that works with and among people.

Artificial intelligence cannot replace human interaction. But it can free up time for what matters most: people. And for figuring out how we can improve our daily lives.

However, technology alone is not enough. We need leadership built on trust. We need communities where it is safe to learn new things and admit that we don’t yet understand. And we need the courage to acknowledge that none of us can solve the challenges of the future alone.

The four principles upon which Kipinä was founded are even more relevant today than they were on the day they were written. In five years, the world has changed faster than anyone could have predicted. But the fundamental truth remains the same: when we put people first, everything else falls into place.

An AI-capable community isn't built on technology alone. It is built on trust, well-being, and the courage to be the best version of ourselves—together.

This is a great start to Kipinä’s next five-year cycles!