SADE Annual General Meeting & Summer Day 2026 – The Year AI Stopped Being New 🌞🤖

A lot happens at SADE year after year. But this year, we found ourselves realizing something for the first time: we're not really a small startup anymore. The SADE team has grown to around forty people already! Over the past year we welcomed a few new experts to the company once again, meaning that our growth continues both steadily and intentionally at our own pace. 👌

A lot has changed over the years. And at the same time, a lot hasn't changed at all.

We still make decisions together at our Annual General Meeting because SADE is an employee-owned company. And we still celebrate our Summer Day on the rooftop terrace of our Turku office, because some traditions are simply too good to break. 😉

But if there's one thing we'll remember specifically about the past year, it's AI. The year AI stopped being new.

• Five years ago, AI was something we read articles about.
• Three years ago, it was something we were learning how to use.
• Over the past couple of years, it became something we actively used, developed, and genuinely benefited from.
• And today, it's simply part of our everyday work across the board.

AI is now present in our tools, internal processes, software development, testing, debugging, customer solution design — in everything. During the past year, we also completed our first major customer project built around a large language model, and there's more to come. We'll be sharing more about that soon — stay tuned! 😄

Perhaps the most interesting thing, however, is that AI has not appeared to us as a threat, but as an enabler. While much of the public discussion focuses on what AI might take away, we've been focused on what it makes possible. As software development becomes faster and more efficient, many ideas and solutions that would have been too expensive to build just a few years ago suddenly become viable. So far, AI has brought us one thing above all else: more work to do. We'll be talking more about this in an upcoming episode of the SADE Podcast — stay tuned! 😄

But AI is useless without people who know how to listen to customers, understand their needs, and genuinely want to succeed together with our customers. While we invest heavily in staying at the forefront of AI-driven software development, we never lose sight of what matters most: delivering real business value to our customers. That's what sets us apart.

Thank you, SADE team.

Thank you, our customers.

And thank you to the rooftop terrace of our Turku office, which keeps reminding us year after year that sometimes the best ideas are born in the sunshine, with a cold drink in hand. 😄💙