ADM & ELEKS Morning Seminar

We are hosting this seminar together with our partner ELEKS, an international IT company founded in Ukraine, with around 2,000 employees and broad experience delivering business-critical projects around the world.

Riho Pihelpuu, CEO of ADM, and Andriy Krupa, CEO of ELEKS, open the morning with an insight into what our two companies have built together and where we are taking it next. Our teams have been building projects in both countries and beyond, and that is the experience you will hear at the seminar.

Shared values, a common view of the world and deliberate support from both countries have carried it this far. That support is also the reason this morning has guests from both governments: cooperation between Estonian and Ukrainian companies is business for both sides, and at the same time it strengthens the economies and the resilience of both countries.

Ms Liina Vahtras, Minister of Economy and Industry of Estonia, and H.E. Mr Volodymyr Boiechko, Ambassador of Ukraine, each give a short address, setting out their view of what Estonia and Ukraine can learn from one another, and what their companies can achieve together. Both governments have worked on joint business development initiatives for years, through their ministries and embassies. Partnerships like ours are one result of that work.

Liina Vahtras, Minister of Economy and Industry of Estonia

H.E. Volodymyr Boiechko, Ambassador of Ukraine to Estonia

Programme

Time	Duration	Item	Speaker
9:00 - 9:30	30 min	Doors, breakfast, coffee & networking	Guests, speakers, ELEKS global management and the ADM team
9:30 - 9:40	5+5 min	Estonia and Ukraine, what ADM and ELEKS have built together, and what comes next	Andriy Krupa (CEO, ELEKS) Riho Pihelpuu (CEO, ADM)
9:40 - 9:45	5 min	Remarks by the Minister of Economy and Industry of Estonia	Ms Liina Vahtras
9:45 - 9:50	5 min	Remarks by the Ambassador of Ukraine to Estonia	H.E. Mr Volodymyr Boiechko
9:50 - 10:10	20 min	Seminar topic 1: What makes large projects work, from Washington to Kyiv	Amy Lewin (Chief Business Officer, North America, ELEKS)
10:10 - 11:00	45 min	Seminar topic 2: AI in digital services. Where you are, what you need, and what it costs	Alex Bowers (Managing Director, Data & AI, ELEKS)
11:00 - 11:30	30 min	Interactive session and networking. Open questions to the speakers, ELEKS global management and the ADM team	Everyone

The morning starts with breakfast at 9:00, so there is time to arrive without rushing and to meet people before the seminar begins. After the 90 minutes of seminar, 30 minutes are set aside for open questions and one-to-one conversation with the speakers, the ELEKS leadership and AI expert team who are in Tallinn, and the ADM team, with refreshments.

What makes large projects work, from Washington to Kyiv

9:50 – 10:10·20 min inc. Q&A

Large projects do not all run on the same logic. In the public sector it is a marathon: mission, policy, teamwork and trust, where compliance is not paperwork but the reason a service can be relied on, and where the appetite for risk is deliberately low.

Commercial work is close to the opposite, always about making or saving money, and much of the trouble in both worlds comes from applying the wrong logic to the wrong programme. Ease matters as much as capability: the lead contractor’s real job is systems integration rather than software development.

Amy Lewin spent decades on the buyer’s side of that table, supporting the United States Department of Defense and other US government clients, and now sees the same programmes from the delivery side in US, Ukraine, Iraq and elsewhere.

This session is about what the commissioning body and the delivery partner each have to do differently, and how speed and new ideas still get into a programme that has to stay inside compliance and governance.

Amy Lewin

Chief Business Officer, North America, ELEKS

Amy has sat on both sides of the public sector table, which is rare. Her three decades on the government side began in the United States Air Force, where she served nearly 23 years on active duty and in the reserves, and continued as a supplier of analytical and technical operational capability to United States government clients, including the Department of Defense. Before joining ELEKS she ran her own solutions company for over a decade and chaired the board of a technology services firm. She now leads ELEKS' commercial and government business in North America, and sees the same kind of programmes from the supplier's side in Ukraine, Iraq and other markets where ELEKS runs business-critical services. She holds a BSc in Business Management and an MSc in Strategic Intelligence.

AI in digital services. Where you are, what you need, and what it costs

10:10 – 11:00·~45 min inc. Q&A

Most organisations know they should be doing more with AI and cannot say where they actually stand. The session opens with a maturity model of four levels, from experimenting, through AI-enhanced and AI-enabled, to AI-native, so you can place your own organisation honestly and decide which level you are really aiming for.

Not everyone needs to reach the top, but everyone should know what the next step demands of their data, their people and their budget. The rest is the foundations and the bill.

You are responsible for a digital service and you want to add AI-enhanced functions to it, in the client-facing part and in your internal workflows: what has to be in place first? The session walks through the architecture for using public cloud models and local LLMs safely, where the data protection and security boundary sits, how to keep output quality under control, and how to plan and optimise what AI costs to run once it is live, including what your own teams and developers consume internally. Applies equally to the public and the private sector.

Alex Bowers

Managing Director, Data & AI, ELEKS

Alex has spent his career on the unglamorous half of AI: the data, the architecture and the economics that decide whether an AI feature survives contact with production. He argues that most failed data and AI investments were lost at the moment someone picked a platform before auditing the data, and that the shortage in most organisations is not AI ideas but the foundations to run them.

He leads ELEKS’ data and AI practice from Boston. ELEKS is an OpenAI Select Partner. Before joining ELEKS he was Data & AI Director at MojoTech and spent more than a decade at Slalom Build, where he co-led the growth of a data team from 20 to 200 people across the US, Canada and LATAM and was responsible for a $50M portfolio of accounts. His delivery record spans platforms on AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake and Databricks for clients in financial services, life sciences, retail and CPG, media and the public sector. Earlier roles include Sogeti and eight years in product leadership at dunnhumby. He holds an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Sussex.