Artificial intelligence is not a silver bullet. Start by defining the problem, the data, and the process – and only then decide whether AI is the best solution for your needs, advises Arash Hajikhani, who is beginning his professorship at VTT.
Successful use of AI is not simple. Too many companies have ended up building AI-powered chatbots for their websites that ultimately fail to serve their intended purpose.
“If the data is not suitable and the intended use has not been carefully considered, the result will be failure. Organizations must understand their own operations, and AI must become part of the company culture,” Arash Hajikhani says.
His background is in natural language processing, text analytics, and machine learning. His recent research has focused on applying language models to support decision-making in the public sector and on developing methods for evaluating AI.
Hajikhani is an advocate for the ethical and responsible use of AI. In his view, especially in systems that process critical information, AI must operate transparently—and it must be possible to intervene in its functioning.
Arash Hajikhani was appointed Research Professor of AI and LLM from 1 September 2025. He has previously served at VTT as Research Team Leader in the Foresight and Data Economy research area (2022–2025), as Senior Data Scientist and Project Manager (2020–2022), and as Data Scientist in the Innovations, Economy and Policy research area (2018–2020). He did his doctoral research in the Software Engineering Department at LUT University, is Adjunct Professor at LUT University, and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
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Arash Hajikhani is an expert in evaluating AI systems and in their ethical and responsible design. He is a research professor of artificial intelligence and large language models at VTT. Arash’s previous positions include research team leader in the Foresight and Data Economy research area, as well as roles as data scientist and project manager. His research focuses on human-centred AI to support decision-making. He holds a PhD from the Software Engineering Department at LUT University, where his research focused on designing novel metrics to measure innovation from text data. Arash values the multidisciplinary environment and collaborative community at VTT and enjoys taking part in its active sports clubs.
