Kristjan Jansons is the co-founder and chief executive of MindTitan, the Tartu, Estonia, machine learning consultancy, and an engineer who built self-driving vehicles before he started selling AI to companies and governments (MindTitan).
From robotics to MindTitan
After a master’s degree in computer science and machine learning, he became team lead for autonomous vehicles at Milrem Robotics, helping build self-driving vehicles, and he has also built intelligent systems for data centers, robots, and electric formula race cars (MindTitan). MindTitan began when he and its other founders entered MARKUS, an AI system that estimates a person’s age from video, in Ajujaht, Estonia’s largest startup competition (MindTitan).
Leading MindTitan in Tartu
He has worked in AI for more than ten years and seen more than 150 projects, and his view is that the business problem decides success more than the model: “The technology has to be smart, of course, but what truly matters is understanding the real business problem it solves” (Tehnopol). As a mentor for the Tehnopol AI Accelerator, he tells founders not to limit themselves “to what AI can do today” and to think about where the technology will be in a couple of years (Tehnopol).
On Estonian business radio he has argued that AI “mostly tends to automate tasks, rarely whole jobs,” while it can still change how a company works from end to end (Äripäev, translated from Estonian).