“Parts of my job have already been replaced – this is why personal growth is so important”

Andreas Roos CMgr FCMI is an AI and digital wizard. Born in Sweden, but now living in London, he is head of design strategy at global payments giant Visa, bridging the gap between product and design. 

“The goal is building better products and building products better,” he says. “It’s about designing culture and behaviour.” 

Before Visa, Andreas, 38, spent seven years working for Google. He is also a volunteer advisor to circular economy start-ups at the University of Helsinki.

Lifelong learning has been a strong theme throughout Andreas’s career, because, he says, it’s fun – but also because, without it, you’re behind the curve. 

Keep up – or quit and go home

“I remember someone talking to us at Google back in 2012,” he says. “They said: ‘If you think things are moving quickly in your industry now, it’s only going to get faster.’

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“Basically, keep up or you can quit and go home. For me, lifelong learning is about being inspired and inspiring. If you turn up to a meeting and announce you haven’t read a new paper since 2011, what are you going to add to the conversation?”

Andreas’s interest in tech started as a child. 

“Other kids were out on their mopeds back in rural Sweden, but my dad worked in IT and in my spare time I built computers. I could see the benefits and potential of technology from an early age, and I suppose I was interested in psychology, too, but I didn’t realise that was what it was called back then.”

He started out working in graphic design, but found it “too fluffy”, so he switched to business, but that was “too structured”. He says: “One day I woke up and thought ‘I just need to get a job.’. I saw an advert for Google and applied. What felt like 5,000 interviews later I got a job there, but I didn’t really know what the job was. It was only in the elevator that someone told me it was a sales job. I was just happy to get a job.”

Cat food and hieroglyphics

In 2015, Andreas went on to work in Google’s so-called Zoo team, a creative think tank for brands and agencies inside Google. 

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“It was fabulous and exciting. We did things like try to use machine learning to understand hieroglyphics better. Or finding pyramids from space using machine learning. Or how to sell more cat food online. It was using cutting-edge online technology – but it was about the psychology, too.”