Shaping customer conversations with AI: meet Susanna Paasovaara – working as an AI trainer at Nordea

That’s where people like Susanna come in. Together with her team, she works on developing Nova, Nordea’s customer-facing chatbot. By combining technology, language and customer insights, the team continuously improves Nova to create a better everyday banking experience. Here, Susanna shares what it’s like to work as an AI trainer at Nordea. 

What does an AI trainer do? 

My daily work is all about creating and maintaining high-quality responses for Nova. Every answer the chatbot gives is manually crafted, tested and refined by my team. Nova is trained to speak our customers’ language, and we design responses based on real customer needs, feedback and behaviour. Continuous improvement is a natural part of our everyday work. 

For many customers, Nova is their first point of contact, whether they’re checking payment limits, exploring loan options or getting help with digital banking. We adapt Nova’s responses to different customer segments, such as Premium customers, as well as different age groups, with particular attention paid to our youngest  customers. This ensures the right tone, wording  and level of care  in every interaction. With tens of thousands of conversations every month, each dialogue is an opportunity to make banking simpler and more reassuring. 

Why Nova doesn’t “learn by itself” 

A common misconception is that AI trainers simply let the chatbot learn on its own. At Nordea, that’s not the case. Nova doesn’t learn independently: every single answer is created, tested and optimised by humans. Working as an AI trainer is a unique blend of content creation, analytics and quality assurance. We  define user needs, build training and test data, validate language , and ensure full compliance with internal and external rules  before anything goes live. 

Although we work closely with AI tools, the trainer role is highly customer centric and language driven. Strong writing skills, an ability to adapt tone of voice  and a deep understanding of customer needs are just as important as technical competence. Our goal is always the same: to make sure Nova speaks the customer’s language, reflects Nordea’s tone of voice and provides accurate, responsible answers.

Putting the customer at the centre

Every improvement starts with one guiding question: how does this help the customer?  Customers care about their experience – not about the systems behind it. Whether we’re working on a new feature, a back-end improvement or a chatbot enhancement, our focus is on making banking faster, easier and more reassuring. 

Most customers value simplicity and clarity. Being able to improve the customer journey step by step and clearly see the impact of that work is what makes this role both meaningful and rewarding.

Ready to move forward with us?

Whether your passion lies in technology, finance, customer experience or sustainability, Nordea is a place where you can grow, make an impact and be part of something bigger. 

Together, we build meaningful careers.