Kari Syrjä Joins the Comintelli team as Vice President of Sales

We are thrilled to have Kari Syrjä join the Comintelli team as Vice President of Sales. Kari Syrjä joins us with over 15 years of previous sales experience and has worked with the likes of Oracle, Canon, Proof Analytics and Vendisys.ai. We sat down with him for a short interview on his experience and what the future holds.

Tell us about your career thus far.

My journey into competitive intelligence began in 2003, where I did a competitive market mapping exercise as a Bachelor thesis for a Finnish wind power company. After this, I began my Master studies at Hanken, The Swedish School of Economics and Business administration.

From 2016 to 2018, I worked with Oracle Northern European’s award-winning internal demand generation center, capturing market signals with intent data.

Now, having had the opportunity to join Comintelli, I could not resist the temptation to dive deeper into a wider world of “unknown unknowns” and early signal detection.

What is included in your current role at Comintelli?

I am primarily involved in acquiring executive-level customers, but my role also involves creating discussions and workshops with Comintelli’s ambassadors about the latest CI & MI insights, as well as overseeing our global demand generation program and thought leadership studies.

What were you most excited about when coming to work at Comintelli?

I was excited to join a top-notch team and a brand that has a global presence, with some of the largest corporates as customers.

Comintelli has a big push towards user-friendliness and scalability, meaning that we take good care of our customers. This means a lot to me personally.

What do you believe is the biggest challenge in CI at the moment?

I constantly hear that customers have a strong need for hidden first-party market data that is not publicly available. This can be both from internal and external sources.

We are certainly leading the way with our recent Slack integration as one small example. We help to gather theinvaluable tacit knowledge which already exists inside the employees’ everyday life.

What do you think differentiates Comintelli and Intelligence2day® from other tools and platforms in CI?

The market is full of extremely niche and simple point solutions, such as sales intelligence simplified to battle cards, but Comintelli raises the bar, enabling customers to embrace multiple layers of complexity. For example, with insights to watch the latest regulation, weak signals in R&D, supply chain, and heat maps; intelligence management can merge in one central place.

Whilst many competitors do new monitoring or trend radars, we have that as our basic ingredient embedded into everything we do. The added value comes from the intelligence management and wider complex contextualization help when you simply need more than average.

What does being future-proof mean to you?

One word: Antifragile. The more you can lift and shift early warning signals, the more resilient you can become to avoid risks and embrace the unknown unknowns.

How do you think the industry will change in the coming 5 years and what are the greatest challenges ahead?

Two megatrends have emerged for quite some time already. Firstly, AI and IoT where machines and algorithms speak to each other, bypassing the need of analysts.

Secondly, the West seems to still be unprepared for the rise of China. It is not about being against China, it is about embracing, facing, translating, learning and understanding. MI & CI platforms play a crucial role here.

Thank you for a great interview, Kari, we really enjoyed getting to know you a little better. We’re also really looking forward to working closely together and achieving great success with you on our side.