Arctic Economic Council

Building Bridges Through Words with AI and the Podio Platform

With the Podio platform, Arctic Economic Council:

• Streamlined over 300 different word collections across the globe
• Leveraged AI to facilitate hundreds of reformatting and translation services, significantly reducing project costs
• Supported clear reporting to promote diversity and balance across gender, geography and profession
• Reduced need for extra headcount to manage communications

Small Team with Large Ambition

Mads Qvist Frederiksen has been the Executive Director of the Arctic Economic Council (AEC) for four and a half years. The globally connected nonprofit is a small secretariat that focuses on bridging the private sector and the Arctic Circle to facilitate various projects in the region.

To capture the essence of the Arctic, the AEC team wanted to produce a coffee-table-style book titled “The Arctic Encyclopaedia” featuring over 300 Arctic-themed words, each defined by a diverse contributor: scientists, artists, youth and Indigenous voices around the world. AEC was even able to recruit various policymakers to participate, including US Senators, EU Commissioners, and European Prime Ministers. To bring this vision to life, Mads needed software that could manage hundreds of data entries, along with automation to format, proofread and translate the content for the final draft. Mads reached out to Anders Bendix Kiel from WorkWays to help him find a solution that met his requirements.

Automating for Success

Collectively, Anders and Mads decided that the modular structure and integrated AI capabilities of the Podio platform made it a strategic option to support the objective. Additionally, Mads cited his longtime Podio use for CRM and event planning purposes, making the decision easy. With only three staff members and limited resources, AEC needed the Podio platform to track hundreds of submissions, manage multilingual content and translations, collaborate with external designers and editors and capture demographics for reporting.

In only 15 hours of work, WorkWays and the AEC had a flow that worked. Each contributor and word had its own entry, with relationship fields tying the two together. As each word submission was made, Mads would upload the original content, which varied from poems to images, into the corresponding entry in the Podio platform. A button below the entry would be pressed to trigger AI to proofread the original content, perform a character and letter count and translate it into Japanese. A process that would’ve taken tens of thousands of euros and many hours happened in a matter of seconds—all built into the workflow.

"I wanted this text to be proofread without changing too much of the content. I also wanted to have it translated into Japanese for my Japanese partners, and then I also wanted to keep track of the process all the way through. This happened automatically thanks to Podio and AI.”—Mads Qvist Frederiksen, Executive Director, Arctic Economic Council

As each step of the process happened, from creation to payment details, the Podio platform sent status notifications to the AEC team to help prevent delays and missed updates. "Instead of emails going back and forth between us and the graphic designer, I just go and upload everything into Podio,” shared Mads. “She gets a notification every time something is updated.”

Results Beyond Expectation

After months of work, the project is nearly complete. With contributors spanning from U.S. Senators to indigenous youth, The Arctic Encyclopaedia showcases the Arctic not just as a region of ice and industry, but as a vibrant, diverse and interconnected community. With the help of the Podio work management platform and WorkWays, Mads and the AEC were able to nurture long-term relationships and spark new ones. It’s a testament to what small teams can accomplish with the right tools and a shared purpose. As Mads put it, “Business happens at the speed of trust. Podio helped us build that trust—efficiently, respectfully, and beautifully.”

Explore the Arctic Economic Council’s impact on the region and how the Podio work management platform can support your efforts toward automation and AI goals.