From left: Heza Wasfy, COO, Vishal Kaura and Emilie Gabrielsen, designer, at our office at Epicenter in Oslo.
Vishal Kaura joined Frontkom on 5 October as Director of AI, Data & Insights. He joins from Itera, where he was Head of Data, AI & Analytics, and is responsible for AI, data and insights at Frontkom.
Kaura has 20 years of experience in finance, cloud economics and data. His goal is for clients to see the effect of AI in their financial results. In his first year he will build three things for our clients:
- Agent solutions that run in production.
- Effect that can be measured on clients' revenue and operating profit.
- Greater AI maturity among clients, for individual employees, for departments and for the organisation as a whole.
A licence alone does not deliver
Kaura often sees the same pattern in organisations that have adopted AI. The licences have been bought, employees have access to the tools, and everyone waits for results. When someone asks what it has delivered, the answer is hard to find in the accounts.
Sound familiar?
According to Kaura, it is the most common mistake organisations make with AI. The tools are handed out, but leadership takes too little part, and the effect never comes.
Read more: Why most companies stop at the chat window
Start with the leadership team
When Kaura meets an organisation with a lot of data and heavy systems, he looks at data quality first. Then he looks for concrete pain points where AI can make a difference, and for what can be solved quickly.
On one assignment, this is how he went about it:
- He brought a leadership team from several disciplines into one room.
- He showed them what AI can do today and asked them to agree on where to focus for the next one to two quarters.
- The group arrived at eleven concrete use cases and chose two of them, because they mattered most to the business, both strategically and financially.
“Where we are now, it is not agents with humans in the loop. It is humans with agents in the loop,” says Kaura.
He believes people should stay at the centre when decisions are made, with AI as a powerful tool.
When the agent does the shopping
Kaura believes online retail is about to change. AI agents will increasingly find, compare and buy goods on behalf of customers. Competition then moves from the website the customer sees to the data the agent reads.
“It will be decided by data quality, trust and how well the store is set up for agents, not by who has the nicest website,” says Kaura.
If you run an online store, these are his three pieces of advice for the next six months:
- Write down the facts about your products and services, and what gives the customer more value than your competitors' offers.
- Describe your customers in detail: who should buy from you, and why.
- Work systematically on data quality and marketing, so your store becomes more relevant when customers search through language models.
Why he chose Frontkom
Kaura has been at Itera since 2023. Before that he spent almost six years at Crayon, including as head of its FinOps services. When he was looking for his next role, it mattered to him that the owners and the strategy were committed to AI, and that Frontkom uses AI in its own work.
He also points to the people he met, a Norwegian business culture with colleagues from across Norway and Europe, and values he recognises as his own. He likes the direction the board has set for the coming years.
An economist first
Kaura holds a master's degree in economics from BI, with a background in investment banking and sales, FinOps and cloud economics. To him, technology is a tool. What matters most is understanding the client's business and what needs to be solved.
He cares about change management, about what token usage costs, and about what each AI initiative returns. Trust, he says, is the most important thing we deliver, because it is what builds lasting client relationships.
Where should you start?
Have you adopted AI without seeing the effect? Talk to Vishal about where it pays to begin. You can reach him at vishal@frontkom.com.
Transparency note: This article is based on an interview with Vishal Kaura. AI has been used as an editorial aid for language and structure.
