Henri Huotari – Chief AI Officer, founder, and operator
Henri Huotari is the founder of Velar Cloud and Huotari OÜ and Chief AI Officer at Immersive. He works at the intersection of AI strategy, product direction and execution, building AI products that feel commercially inevitable, and has built software, products and AI-native experiences for more than ten years, from Dubai and Tallinn.
What I do
I work at the intersection of AI strategy, product direction and execution. The goal is not simply to launch new capability, but to turn it into products that feel clear, credible and valuable from day one.
I'm an entrepreneur, AI product leader and developer who enjoys the hard part of new technology: figuring out what deserves to exist, and then pushing it all the way into reality.
Why I'm building Velar Cloud
Most business-growth tooling is fragmented. Owners pay for ten things that almost connect. Velar Cloud is a growth operating system: CRM, marketing automation, content tooling and AI assistance in one platform, instead of ten separate subscriptions stitched together.
- CRM and pipelines that work natively with email, SMS and scheduling.
- AI automations for everyday work: drafting, follow-ups, recaps and lead qualification.
- Integrations with the tools small businesses already use, such as Shopify, Stripe, OpenAI, WordPress, Twilio and Zoom.
The promise of "take back control of your time" only lands when the toolchain stops fighting you. Velar Cloud exists to give small businesses the same operational leverage that AI-native startups have, without the integration tax.
How I build
- Build with intent. Every interaction should feel chosen, not inherited from a template.
- Use AI where it compounds. The goal is leverage and delight, not AI for its own sake.
- Keep quality visible. People notice polish before they can explain it, so it has to be present everywhere.
- A reliable workflow beats a magical one. Users forgive constraints. They don't forgive unpredictability.
- Design the workflow first, then decide where AI belongs inside it.
The AI products that win feel inevitable: they don't advertise the model first, they make the user feel suddenly more capable. I wrote more about it in The AI Products That Win Feel Inevitable.
Experience
- 2025 – present · Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, Immersive. Building the Immersive AI API: one endpoint for image, video, speech, music, 3D and text generation, with native support for AI agents.
- 2024 – 2025 · Head of AI, Advantage. AI strategy and practical implementation for growth-oriented products and automation.
- 2023 – 2024 · Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, Sumo Apps. Led Sumo Paint AI from concept into production-grade creative tooling.
- 2022 – 2023 · Head of Partnerships, Sumo Apps. Worked on the Create, Instruct and Reimagine AI modes in Sumo Paint.
- 2020 – 2022 · Quality Assurance Manager, Sumo Apps.
- Education: Information and Communication Technology Engineer, Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences (2018 – 2022).
Alongside Immersive I run Huotari OÜ, a Tallinn-based AI agency for custom builds, consulting and training, and Velar Cloud. I also publish frontier-AI news in Finnish at automatisointi.fi under the line "Tulevaisuus on automaattinen". I'm based in Dubai and Tallinn.
Let's talk
Want to see how Velar Cloud would work in your business? Book a free 30-minute call and we'll go through it together. For advisory, AI product or consulting work, email me at henri@huotari.ai.