Enterprise software once followed a predictable chain of command. A senior buyer chose the system, IT rolled it out and employees were expected to use it. Christian Lund, co-founder of document generation software company Templafy, thinks that model has changed.
“There was a long, long time where it was about getting the business buyer first, the one that would make decisions on behalf of the whole company,” he says. “That switched almost overnight. All of a sudden, it was much more users driving this.”
Lund, who is from Copenhagen, studied political science before moving into technology about 25 years ago. Across several shifts in enterprise technology, one lesson keeps resurfacing: businesses can buy software, but employees still have to want to use it.
“You have to get the user first,” Lund says. For vendors, that creates a balancing act. Employees want tools that help them work faster. Employers want control, consistency and safeguards.
“What they want to achieve is to work fast,” he says. “Be there first, and then, as they do that, make sure the business gets what it wants as well.”
Getting ahead without losing the customer
When generative AI gained mainstream attention, Lund says Templafy quickly concluded that businesses would eventually need more control over how the technology was used.
“We thought very early on you will need to have a way to allow the business to be inserted in that conversation somehow,” he says. “Otherwise it’s going to be difficult to get to the level of quality, the level of consistency, that is typically a requirement for business results.”
Many customers were not yet ready for that conversation.
“There was a strong perception that work is done. AI is now taking care of everything,” Lund recalls. “Everything it doesn’t solve immediately, just wait three days and you’ll see what happens.”
Templafy may have been right about where the market was heading, but Lund says it misjudged how quickly customers would get there. “We were a little bit ahead of ourselves,” he says.
That led to a rethink of the product. Templafy had focused on more complex business uses, but realised it needed something employees could immediately understand.
There was a strong perception that work is done. AI is now taking care of everything
Templafy’s Document Agents illustrate that approach. In PowerPoint, users can generate presentations through a chat interface, with company templates, tone of voice and compliance controls applied to the output.
Lund says the simpler capability helped Templafy “get invited into the conversations” before it could “put our differentiation on top of that”.
The lesson is simple: being right about the technology is not enough if customers are not ready to buy the argument.
Saving time is not enough
Lund also questions one of technology’s oldest promises: saving employees time.
Ask what happens when software removes an hour from somebody’s workload and his answer is simple: “You can do more or you can go home earlier.”
“Fast is not a pillar you want to stand on if you’re in business,” he adds. “It’s great as long as you’re also delivering high quality and you’re doing that consistently.”
For Lund, speed is becoming less of a differentiator. “Saving time is almost a commodity,” he says.
The harder question is what companies do with that extra capacity. A task taking fewer minutes does not automatically mean the business has become more productive.
Lund thinks leaders should focus less on whichever technology is attracting attention and more on the problem they are trying to solve. “There are a lot of AI toys that can do impressive stuff but are also impressively useless if you try to apply them to real use cases,” he says. “It’s really back to what it was. It’s all about the use case.”
Listening without bending
Lund accepts that emerging technologies often require more consulting because companies are still working out what they need.
“At these stages of technology cycles there is definitely more consulting,” he says. “There’s still a lot of figuring out.”
You need to be able to set direction for what AI should do
But when asked how far Templafy will change its product for one large customer, he is clear about the boundary. “We never bent for a customer,” he says. “We love to collaborate, but we don’t build custom products on specific requests.”
Customer feedback can alter the wider product strategy, he says, but only where the change makes sense beyond one organisation. “We want to make sure that we create a better product also for the next customer.”
The user’s job is changing too
For Lund, winning over users does not mean taking them out of the process. As technology handles more of the execution, he thinks people will spend more time deciding what needs to be done and judging whether the result is any good.
“You need to be able to set direction for what AI should do,” he says, “or you need to be able to validate the output.”
Lund’s broader point is a familiar one. Vendors still need to solve a real problem, employees need a reason to use the product and businesses need to trust what comes out of it.
For all the talk of technological disruption, Lund’s argument comes down to something less dramatic: if people won’t use the software and the business can’t trust it, the rest hardly matters.
Enterprise software once followed a predictable chain of command. A senior buyer chose the system, IT rolled it out and employees were expected to use it. Christian Lund, co-founder of document generation software company Templafy, thinks that model has changed.
“There was a long, long time where it was about getting the business buyer first, the one that would make decisions on behalf of the whole company,” he says. “That switched almost overnight. All of a sudden, it was much more users driving this.”
Lund, who is from Copenhagen, studied political science before moving into technology about 25 years ago. Across several shifts in enterprise technology, one lesson keeps resurfacing: businesses can buy software, but employees still have to want to use it.
