Trends With: Susanne Blanke
Susanne Blanke is VP AI Strategy & Transformation at Husqvarna Group, leading the company's AI strategy and enterprise-wide transformation. She works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, business strategy, and organizational change, with a focus on helping global businesses adopt AI to drive innovation, improve decision-making, and create long-term value.
Husqvarna Group is a global leader in innovative solutions for forests, parks, and gardens, combining over three centuries of engineering expertise with cutting-edge technology. Committed to driving innovation through AI, digitalization, and sustainability, the company empowers professionals and consumers worldwide with smarter, more efficient solutions that shape the future of outdoor environments.
What trends do you see within your line of business?
I lead AI strategy and transformation for Husqvarna Group, and in this field there is no shortage of disruptive and impactful trends. The most critical force reshaping every knowledge-intensive industry is Generative AI and its rapidly maturing successor: agentic AI.
The productivity gains are real. We see everything from 20-50% productivity gains from generative AI depending on role and activity.
The shift from generative to agentic AI is now underway. We are moving from AI that augments individual tasks to AI that runs entire workflows with little or no human in the loop. The organizations pulling ahead are redesigning their operating models around this, not as a technology project, but as a fundamental rethinking of how work gets done.
The skills premium is shifting accordingly. Demand is rising for people who exercise judgment of context and those who can redesign processes end-to-end. Contrary to common belief it is not necessary junior employees skilled in AI that will play a vital role for companies in this shift. I, and peer, see huge value in senior employees who know what good looks like and who effectively use AI.
Judgment over output. The human job is no longer producing the answer - it is knowing whether the answer is right. That skill is built through experience.
Systems thinking and process redesign. Real value comes from redesigning work from the ground up, not layering AI on top of broken processes. The ability to see a workflow end-to-end is increasingly critical.
AI fluency as a thinking tool. Not prompting tricks. The ability to frame a problem well, interrogate the output, and catch a confident-sounding wrong answer before it becomes a decision.
From your perspective, what are the greatest challenges right now?
The greatest challenges are threefold, and they are not technical.
First: the leadership knowledge gap. Senior leaders are expected to drive AI integration across their functions, yet often lack the foundational understanding to do so. You cannot lead a transformation you do not grasp. Leaders must walk the talk and themselves explore what AI can do. Without any exception successes always started here.
Second: AI is still treated as an IT topic. Many companies have handed the AI agenda to their CTO. This is a mistake as AI is a business transformation topic. The value lives in process change, behavioral change, and reimagined customer and employee experiences. Technology is the enabler, not the driver.
Third: the underestimation of transformation depth. Companies consistently underestimate what it actually takes to ingrain AI and extract full value from it. Real transformation cannot be outsourced to consultants. It has to be owned, built, and sustained inside the teams doing the work. That capability, the ability to lead deep organizational change from within, is rare. Building it is slow.
And, opportunities?
They are immense.
AI is the most significant productivity and value-creation force of our generation. The efficiency gains are real, but they are the smaller part of the story. The bigger shift is in the speed and quality of problem-solving. When teams can think faster, iterate faster, and prototype faster, value toward customers accelerates in ways that compound.
For employees, this is genuinely liberating. We remove the tedious, repetitive layers of knowledge work. People get to spend more time on actual creation: judgment calls, client relationships, product thinking, the work that is hard to systematize because it requires being human. Companies that embed AI as a natural part of how people work will attract the talent that matters. The ones that do not will lose it.
For customers, the change is concrete: faster service, more personalized experiences, and interactions that actually feel relevant rather than generic. For companies, the opportunity spans from cost efficiency - fewer people needed for the same output - to capability democratization. Work that previously required expensive external expertise can increasingly be done in-house. Software development is the clearest example: across companies you can today do with employees and AI at ca 50% of your workforce.
The organizations capturing the opportunity are the ones that have aligned leadership, redesigned their processes and made the transformation a business priority.