We should expect AI to go through the same development as other transformative technologies. First a surge of highly inflated expectations, then the trough of despair, followed by a rise to a plateau of productivity.
AI in a changed geopolitical landscape and a tool for innovation was the main subject of the DIG Summit 2025. An opening assumption to ponder for the gathered business leaders and academic scholars was that AI is now at the peak of inflated expectations on its introductory development, while we talk about it as if it was already productive.
The opening warnings came from Research Manager for Analytics and AI at research foundation Sintef, Signe Riemer-Sørensen. She warned that we are perhaps too hasty in using these new tools, rather than understanding how they work.
So far, we have barely used AI for decision making on a large scale.
– It is hard for AI to predict consequences of decisions. Getting in place a method for validating and verifying decisions is expensive, and very few corporations have so far had any real success in using AI in decision making. – AI has so far been designed to treat and consider data, not make decisions. The next generation AI will be programmed for decision making, she said.
AI is a lot like the steam engine was in its time. It is an enabling technology that impacts production, productivity and innovation across the board, according to head of DIG, Professor Bram Timmermans. He claims that so far, most corporations in Norway are at the point where they use AI for incremental improvements and innovation in current operations.
- The greater potential in AI comes from more radical innovations where we use it for more than internal changes. These innovations will change the company, but also radically change products and how clients adopt and use new and innovative products, such as autonomous cars, Timmermans pointed out in his address to the DIG Summit 2025.
A Dig Summit also invites business leaders from Dig’s partners and others to the format “fireside chat” – which is an unscripted dialogue between the participants about the subject of the day. Participants this time was the newly appointed Executive in Residence of NHH Executive, Thor Gjermund Eriksen, chair of the board at Dig, Rune Skjelvan, CEO of KPMG, Cecilia Flatum, CEO of Deloitte Norway, and Liv Dingsør, CEO of Digital Norway.
The chat covered a range of related subjects, with a broad agreement that it is vital that businesses as well as the public sector, start trying out, gathering knowledge and gaining experience in using AI, and testing it out on decision making. They also observed several challenges, such as personal data protection regulations making it hard or impossible for AI and its agents to train and learn from existing data. Rune Skjelvan of KPMG observed that Norwegian businesses were leading globally in testing and piloting of AI but failed in scaling up.
Geopolitics was presented to the Dig Summit as something to consider much more carefully than we have been used to. COO Endre Dingsør of European consultancy group Forte Digital told the summit that geopolitics come together with the technology.
- I haven’t really considered this for many years, but now this is reality, he said.
Digital sovereignty, controlling your infrastructure, health services and transport and knowing who has the power to “switch off” important infrastructure is not about protectionism anymore, but rather about balance.
- If you don’t have anything to bring to the table, you are not in a partnership. Even with your closest allies you must have something to offer that makes you an interesting asset. If not, you are just a consumer, he said.
