AI belongs to everyone, so it has to be explained to everyone
Tekoälli explains artificial intelligence so that it can be understood without a technical background, without simplifying it into being wrong.
Who this is for
Decision-makers, specialists, students and anyone who has to take a position on AI without having built any of it. You can read it in order from the beginning or look up a single word in the glossary.
The principles
01
Plain language, no hedging
Jargon is named when it is the established term, but it is always unpacked. Nobody should need a second source open to follow the news about their own field.
02
No hype and no doom
AI is neither magic nor the end of the world. Both extremes make it harder to understand. This site reports what is known and says plainly when something is uncertain.
03
The whole picture before the details
A single technique is easier to grasp once you know where it sits in the chain. That is why the content is arranged in layers, from electricity to business.
04
Written from Europe, and about the money
The interesting question is usually not how a model works but what follows from it: what it costs to run, where the grid connection comes from, what the rules require and who is liable when it goes wrong.
Author
Who writes this
Harri Salomaa
I was born and raised in Tampere, Finland. I qualified as a process engineering graduate in 1986 and joined Valmet Automation the same year, developing the Damatic XIS information management system and working on customer projects. The work was already what it is now: collect data from a production process and try to infer something useful from it. In 1992 I moved to Nokia, first to base station configuration software and eventually to lead R&D for network management systems. Network management is network data analysis in practice: measurements arrive faster than anyone can look at them, so the machine has to say which ones matter.
From 1995 I lived and worked in the United States and Germany for twenty years in total. In Silicon Valley I led software development at HP's Immersive Computing Lab, and I was also CTO of a SaaS company. I returned to Finland at the beginning of 2025. I am a citizen of both Finland and the United States.
At Tietoevry I was responsible first for product development services, then for international markets, and most recently for Tietoevry Create. In substance it was high-technology digitalisation built into other companies' products: telecom operators' networks and systems, automotive software and smart devices. Close to 10,000 engineers doing work that ends up in a product rather than in a presentation. That teaches you fairly precisely which technology survives daylight and which does not.
After returning to Finland I built business development at NestAI from scratch and led sales through the company's first commercial growth phase, including its most significant deals that year. I now serve there as an adviser. That showed me AI from the side where a customer decides whether to pay for it or not, which is a different view from product development.
I retired from full-time work in April 2026, exactly forty years after graduating. I still run Aitoware from Tampere and have added professional certificates along the way: AI and machine learning at Berkeley and MIT, and autonomous aerospace systems at the University of Naples Federico II. I still write code most days.
Corrections
Found an error, or a word left unexplained? Corrections are welcome: accuracy is this site's most important feature.
harri@aitoware.com