Tieto, an IT software and service company and provider of IT and product engineering services with headquarters in Uusimaa, Finland, said Monday that it has appointed Artificial Intelligence as a member of the leadership team of its new data-driven businesses unit.

The AI, called Alicia T, is the first AI to be nominated to a leadership team in an OMX-listed company, the company said. Alicia T. will become a full-fledged member of the management team and also possess the capacity to cast votes.

Alicia T’s role in the leadership team will be to support data-driven decision-making and innovations around new data-driven ideas with the help of machine intelligence and advanced data analytics. Technically, “the member is equipped with a conversational interface system so it is possible have a discussion with it and ask questions about anything,” said Tieto.

The AI was built by developers at Tieto’s data-driven business unit on top of Tieto’s startup team’s M2M robotics system and chassis. Tieto said it is using this experiment to test technologies related to conversational interface, as conversational engines like Apple’s personal assistant Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana lead the way in natural language processing, which will eventually be used in enterprise-grade services as well.

“AI is a hot topic now; speculation, theory and research on the potential future of machine learning and artificial intelligence is running wild. With this project our team wanted – in an agile startup way – to study the effects of decision-making in human-robot team,” said Taneli Tikka, Head of Innovation Incubation, Data-Driven Businesses.

Tieto believes AI will help the management team to become data-driven and will assist the team in seeking innovative ways to pursue opportunities in the data-driven world.