About

I'm CIO at Pactum AI, where I support running the company through technology the company depends on. I've seen AI agents from both ends: building them for Fortune 500 teams, and adopting them across a 150-person company.

Pactum's AI agents have autonomously negotiated tens of billions of dollars in supplier deals: we've been building agents since before GPT-3 existed. Internally, I run an AI transformation initiative where we've rolled out general-purpose AI agents to every employee, not just engineers.

This site is working notes: what I'm building and learning, often written before I've figured it out. Thinking-in-progress is more useful than polished conclusions.

Background

Before Pactum: built and led the AI team at Veriff (now a unicorn), where I rebuilt the core product around AI. Founded NFTPort ($26M Series A from Atomico). Based in Tallinn, Estonia. From 2015 to 2021 I wrote in Estonian at pungas.ee.

Working together

Not pursuing large commitments. Open to projects that align with my priorities. Three kinds I say yes to:

Talks and workshops. On deploying AI in production, enterprise AI adoption, and operating complex systems. Formats from a 30-minute conference talk to a half-day leadership workshop. Recently at Latitude59, Nordic Testing Days, and a KPMG Estonia strategy day. Full list of past talks and topics.

Technical due diligence on AI companies. For investors deciding whether an AI product is real: what the team has actually built, which parts a competitor could rebuild in a quarter, and where the pitch runs ahead of the system. I've been on both sides of technical diligence, answering it through NFTPort's Series A and Pactum's Series C, and running it on the buy side of an acquisition. A handful of investors have also come to me for a read on a company they were weighing. I'm a buyer too, evaluating and rolling out AI tools across Pactum.

Thinking partner on AI. Recurring conversations with a CEO, CTO, or CIO working out what to do about AI in their own company: where agents pay off, what to build versus buy, how to get a whole company using them rather than a pilot team. Founders building an AI product tend to bring different questions, usually about what to ship once the demo works and how to tell whether it's any good. I've advised Rendin and DriveX on AI, product, technology, and key hires, and I've run this as a standing setup with a seed-stage CEO, a seed-stage CTO, and a Series A CTO, the longest of those for three years.

Contact

Reach me at taivo@pungas.ee. Include what you want to do, why me specifically, and rough scope and timeline.