Ted Lagerström on why AI transformation is really about people

At Uvance Wayfinders, we are a diverse group of talented consultants, leveraging our expertise and experience to solve our clients’ challenges and unlock business value. This series discusses who we are, why we are here, and how we, as individuals and as a business, bring value to both our clients and to society.

Here we hear from Ted Lagerström, Director for Data & AI at Uvance Wayfinders in Sweden. Ted shares why he believes AI is fundamentally reshaping how organizations think, work, and transform, and why the leaders who will thrive are those who put business outcomes and people ahead of technology.

I’ve spent many years in IT consulting, but my real passion has always been for the business side, understanding what makes organizations tick and helping them change.

Early in my career at CGI, I learned that winning a deal is really about listening. The largest engagements I led (with IKEA, Ericsson, Tetra Pak, and the City of Stockholm) all started with understanding the client’s actual challenge, not pitching the portfolio.

Moving through leadership roles at TietoEVRY and Fujitsu, I kept coming back to the same insight: technology only creates value when the organization around it is ready to change. That means culture, leadership, and ways of working matter more than any platform.

The best outcomes come from teams that are trusted, empowered, and aligned around a shared purpose.

When I was asked to build Fujitsu’s Digital Experience practice from scratch in 2021, I had a blank canvas. No team, no portfolio, just a mandate to rethink how we serve customers. Within two years we’d built a profitable, growing practice with over 40 consultants.

That experience taught me something important: the organizations that succeed aren’t the ones with the most advanced technology; they’re the ones willing to rethink how they work.

Wayfinders takes that philosophy global. What drew me in was the ambition to help companies navigate the fundamental shift AI is bringing, not just to their IT systems, but to their business models, decision-making, organizational culture and nevertheless the geopolitical perspective like Digital Sovereignty.

Backed by Fujitsu’s long-term, trust-based Japanese heritage, this felt like the right place to do meaningful work.

We’re entering what many call the agentic era, where AI doesn’t just assist; it acts. That’s exactly where Wayfinders operates.

Most consulting firms deliver a strategy deck and move on. We stay through execution and measure outcomes, because we know that over 80% of AI initiatives fail*, often due to siloed thinking, not technology gaps.

What sets us apart is that we approach AI transformation as a business and culture challenge first. Combined with Fujitsu’s 90-year commitment to sustainable innovation and a genuinely long-term client perspective, we help organizations move from experimentation to enterprise-wide impact.

AI is changing three things simultaneously: how organizations think, how they work, and how they transform. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% today**. But the real disruption isn’t technical; it’s organizational.

Leaders will soon manage hybrid teams of people and intelligent agents. That demands new ways of making decisions, new governance models, and a culture that embraces continuous change rather than project-based transformation.

My role at Wayfinders is to help clients across the public sector, retail, and manufacturing navigate exactly this shift. I bring 20 years of building businesses from scratch and leading large-scale transformations, where success always came down to the same thing: putting people and business outcomes at the center. I’m also deeply committed to growing the next generation of consultants who think business-first and see technology as an enabler, not the end goal.

The organizations that will thrive in this new era aren’t the most technically advanced; they’re the most adaptable.