Boris Tan helps migrants in Chinese - with the help of artificial intelligence if needed

Singaporean-born Boris Tan greets us with a smile in the Mainio lobby. His friendliness is reflected in his whole being and you can imagine that it's easy to come to him for advice and help.

And of course those are asked from him. His workplace, International House Tampere, is a service point that supports international residents to live, work, study and connect with local employers.

Tan specialises in helping Chinese-speaking clients, but also serves them in English. However, he prefers to do the interview in Finnish, which already works well for a man who has lived in Finland for five years.

- My wife is Finnish and we initially lived in Singapore. However, finding a job there is not easy for a foreigner, so we moved to Finland in 2019, Tan explains.

- In Finland, working life is also more relaxed and open. In Singapore, working days are long and the work culture is authoritarian, meaning you don't question your superiors. Here, you can ask questions and question, says Tan.

He attended integration training at the TE Office to learn the language and then worked for two years at an IT start-up before going to work in Mainio.

Artificial intelligence has evolved tremendously in a short time

Tan himself has modernised his workplace methods, for example by actively using artificial intelligence in customer service. He can answer routine customer questions with a routine or a little research, but sometimes those methods are not enough.

- If a customer's issue is exceptionally difficult or concerns a specialised field, I ask the AI for an answer. Of course, you still have to check the answer yourself, because sometimes AI can get a bit carried away, Tan points out.

In fact, he uses AI almost every day and boasts that its capabilities have improved dramatically even in just a few months.

- It can already answer and translate very well in languages such as English, Chinese and Arabic.

In AI training, it is often mentioned that being friendly and polite to the AI will help it give better answers. Tan hasn't heard of this, but that's OK.

- I always ask politely anyway, because it's my habit, he smiles.

Students want information on job search in Finland

Tan is also happy to go out of the office to give advice to foreign students. Once a month, he visits the campuses of educational institutions in Tampere.

- The most common questions students ask are about the immigration process, learning Finnish and job search. Many of them would like to stay in Finland to work, he points out.

However, he asks them to bring the most complex problems to the office to be solved.

- Of course, I try to help clients learn to manage their own affairs, so that they integrate better and I can help more of those who have just immigrated, says Tan.

Although the number of native speakers of Chinese in Tampere has increased, fewer and fewer of them end up as his clients. Tan suspects the reason is that many of them can also do business in English, so they may not bother to look for services in their mother tongue. Most of the Chinese speakers are Chinese, but at least one has been from Malaysia.

- I am now actively trying to market our Chinese-language services, says Tan.

Around ten per cent of Tampere residents are from outside Finland and the same proportion speak a language other than Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue. Tan is one of them, but how does he fare in a city much smaller than Singapore?

- Tampere is just the right size, he says, smiling again.