Industry Project 2025/2026: Brillian

The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.

We have done our IDBM industry project in collaboration with Brillian, an early-stage consulting company specializing in human-centered AI adoption. Our task was to help Brillian figure out how they could further develop their service offering to support customers through AI transformation in a human-centered, structured and actionable way. Brillian works primarily across the Nordics and Europe with large-scale enterprises like Siemens helping them navigate AI transformation and adoption with a distinctly human-centric lens. The project was supported by the EIT Project CODEUNITED - EIT Higher Education Initiatives.

When we received the project brief in January, the scope felt broad. Understanding what "AI readiness" actually means – and how to measure it – turned out to be a challenge that would stay with us throughout the entire process.

A merged team picture taken during our trips to Seoul and London

In the beginning of the project, we spent a lot of time simply trying to understand the landscape. Concepts like human-centric AI and AI readiness needed unpacking before we could do anything meaningful with them. We quickly realised that even though the project revolves around technology, it was fundamentally about change management. How people adapt to change, how organisations shift and what makes some companies move faster than others were interesting things to investigate.

To build an understanding of AI successful adoption, we conducted around twenty interviews with industry leaders – companies, researchers and practitioners across Finland and the Nordics. The interviews gave us a solid picture of the local AI landscape, but we wanted to see what things looked like in places where adoption is happening at a different pace. Therefore we started planning a research trip to Seoul.

Things took an unexpected turn when one team member had to stay in Europe. Rather than seeing this as a setback, we split the team: most of the team headed to South Korea while one member covered London. In hindsight, getting both a European and an Asian perspective made our research far richer than if we had all gone to the same place.

The London leg was intense, two days packed with nine meetings. The city has a unique energy around AI. Compared to the Nordics, the speed is simply different. We encountered companies experimenting boldly with deployment strategies, organisations educating entire workforces on running AI agents and a general willingness to disrupt existing operations rather than just optimise them. It was, in some ways, a glimpse of where the Nordic ecosystem might be heading in a few years.

In Seoul, the rest of the team spent nine days conducting six interviews, visiting an AI  exhibition and, just as importantly, observing everyday life. The cultural context for AI adoption in South Korea is strikingly different from Europe, and our interviews confirmed what we could see on the streets. Adoption in South Korea is shaped by a distinct set of societal norms and work-culture dynamics. Our observations consistently correlated with what we heard in meetings, giving us confidence in the findings. The team recorded daily vlogs throughout the trip, partly to document the experience, but also as a way to keep the whole team connected and to reflect on what we were learning each day.

On a personal level, the trips were formative. For those who went to Seoul, it was a chance to experience a culture profoundly different from our own, not only in terms of AI, but in everyday life. For the team member in London, working solo across a packed schedule was its own kind of challenge and reward. Despite the distance, the whole team stayed in daily contact, sharing findings and keeping each other in the loop. The experience pulled the team closer together, and we came back more aligned than before.

After returning from the trips, we synthesised our research and presented three strategic directions to the client. Together we landed on a direction that combined elements from several of the visions: a tool designed to help organisations evaluate their current state of AI readiness and plan for future adoption. The solution is conceptual – our deliverable is closer to a proposal and a prototype that visualises the idea rather than a finished product. And that, in itself, has been one of the biggest learning experiences of this project.

Working with definitions that keep shifting, producing something that never becomes fully concrete, and accepting that there may not be a single right answer, are not easy things to be comfortable with. But over the course of seven months, we have grown more at ease with ambiguity and high-level ideation. The IDBM faculty and programme supported us well along the way. The mentoring sessions and structured milestones helped us maintain momentum, even when we felt like we were behind schedule. In reality, we were often further ahead than we thought.

As we now enter the final stretch, we are refining our concept and preparing to present it during the Impact Gala. We feel confident in what we have built, not just the solution itself, but the understanding behind it. Companies like Brillian are laying the groundwork for a stronger AI ecosystem in the Nordics, and we are proud to be contributing to that effort.

Learn more about the team:

Henrik Jansson (IDBM ARTS)

Hanna Kiss (IDBM ARTS)

Casper Biström (IDBM SCI)

Nalle Silberstein (IDBM BIZ)

Van Nguyen (Jodie) (IDBM BIZ)

Artem Kislukhin (IDBM ELEC)

Learn more about CODEUNITED