"Be Actively Lazy": Aarnio's Early Bet on AI and the Partnership That Followed
Teemu Aarnio's family has a motto: Be actively lazy. It sounds like a contradiction, but for the Development Director of Tilitoimisto Aarnio, a third-generation, family-owned accounting firm based in Turku Finland, it's an operating principle.
"Whenever we encounter a repetitive task, we immediately stop and ask: can this be automated? If the answer is yes, it will be. We spend a lot of time identifying repetitive processes that are worth making more efficient," Teemu Aarnio explains.
That relentless focus on eliminating wasted effort led Aarnio to adopt AI tools as early as 2021, making them one of the first accounting firms in Finland to implement artificial intelligence in their financial management software, Netvisor. But it also led to a bigger question: could AI tackle the most persistent time drain in accounting, the daily hunt for reliable regulatory and compliance information?
The Meeting That Changed the Plan
Aarnio had been considering building their own language model trained on financial administration data. Then, on January 9, 2025, he met Francois Roux and Luis Lopez, co-founders of Taxxa AI.
The plan changed within hours.
"I saw immediately that we should focus on our own core competence, service, and leave software development to a specialist. Taxxa's strength was clearly in building this kind of tool. They had the right focus and a really skilled team," Aarnio recalls.
"What struck me most was the genuine listening, the desire to understand our daily work down to the smallest details. The meeting ran way over time, but neither side minded. Both parties got enormous value from it."
That first conversation wasn't just introductions. Aarnio proposed specific data sources he believed the tool needed and was stunned when they appeared in the product almost immediately. One suggestion in particular would prove pivotal: integrating Finland's collective labor agreements, known as TES.
Francois Roux, CEO of Taxxa AI, remembers the meeting the same way.
"What impressed me most was Teemu's ability to describe the industry's current challenges with remarkable clarity and propose concrete solutions. When a partner communicates their vision that effectively, it becomes much easier for us to identify and build the right automations."
Measuring the Impact
The collaboration began with a structured, month-long trial. Aarnio's team first logged the time they spent on information retrieval each day without Taxxa. Then the tool was introduced, and the measurement was repeated.
"The results were astounding. Information retrieval became significantly faster," says Aarnio. "Taxxa has been a turning point in our daily work because it gives us access to reliable, curated, credible information we can actually trust."
Today, every employee at Tilitoimisto Aarnio has access to Taxxa, and the service is used daily across the firm.
Why Training Matters as Much as the Tool
Giving everyone a login was only the starting point. Aarnio and Taxxa invested jointly in training sessions on effective prompting, teaching the team how to instruct the AI to get the best possible answers.
"Access to the tool is only half the battle," says Roux. "This technology is new for everyone, and the training phase should never be underestimated. The company commits the time, and we bring the training expertise. We work alongside our clients to understand their processes firsthand, so the solutions truly fit their needs."
A Partnership, Not a Vendor Relationship
What sets this collaboration apart is its reciprocity. Aarnio's decades of industry knowledge feeds directly into Taxxa's product roadmap, while Taxxa's technical execution improves Aarnio's operations in return.
The TES integration is the clearest example. Before Taxxa, finding the right clause in the right collective labor agreement was a manual, time-consuming process, the kind of routine lookup that slows down payroll work across the industry. Aarnio flagged it in that very first meeting, and it has since become one of Taxxa's most valued features among users.
Other development ideas originating from Aarnio, including the ability to import and process a firm's own files in a secure, closed environment, and the creation of custom workflows, are now being built into the platform.
"It has been wonderful to see how Taxxa listens to our industry's demands and genuinely wants to understand why a certain feature would help us. After that, they implement the solution remarkably fast," says Aarnio.
Roux is equally direct about the value of the relationship.
"As an early-stage startup, our priority is achieving strong product-market fit in accounting and finance as quickly as possible. The insights we gain from understanding Aarnio's needs are just as valuable to us as the fees they pay, if not more. We're grateful for their openness."
Looking Ahead
For Aarnio, the partnership fits a pattern the firm has followed for over six decades: lead, don't follow.
"We have always aimed to be trendsetters. We meet with Taxxa regularly, and these meetings are incredibly rich in ideas. I'm proud that we're once again a pioneer in our field, and that we've built a strategic partnership with Taxxa that will continue long into the future," Aarnio says.
The broader lesson is straightforward. The intelligent use of automation and AI in financial administration doesn't replace expertise, it redirects it.
When routine information retrieval takes minutes instead of hours, accountants can spend their time where it matters most: advising clients, solving complex problems, and adding real value.
