Fresh Takes & Updates

Normain is now a member of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce for the UK (SCC), one of the most established networks for Swedish business in Britain. It is a natural home for us as we grow in the UK, and it puts us alongside companies that have made the same journey across the North Sea for more than a century.

We recently took part in AccessUK, the exclusive programme that helps a small number of high-performing Swedish scaleups break into the UK market. Run by Kista Science City, in collaboration with the Swedish Chamber of Commerce for the UK and the British Embassy Stockholm, it is designed to provide hands-on insights and valuable connections to accelerate companies’ expansion in the British market. We came out of it with a concrete plan for the UK, a network of operators and advisers who know the market inside out, and a clear read on the demand: British firms are ready for what Normain does.

That demand is no surprise to us. London is one of the world's great centres for audit, compliance, and financial services work, and we already have UK customers who rely on Normain for it.

"Working through AccessUK and joining the SCC gave us both a real feel for the UK market and the network to build in it. The UK is one of the most demanding markets in the world for the high-stakes document work we support, which is exactly why we want to be there. We are treating this as the start of a serious commitment, not a short visit."

— Dennis Landfors, COO and co-founder of Normain

What this changes for UK firms

UK firms are working under real pressure. Expanding regulations, increasing client demands, and conclusions that have to hold up if a partner, a client or a regulator asks how it was reached. That is a hard balance to strike when the material underneath is hundreds of pages of contracts, filings and policies that still have to be read by someone.

Normain, the Extractional AI platform, was built for this. It reads the documents once and returns structured insights, with the source behind every figure and every clause. The work stays consistent across ten documents or a thousand, and it holds up the moment it is questioned. Your experts are left to do what clients actually pay for: interpret, advise and decide.

"What UK firms tell us is that the hard part is rarely reaching an answer. It is being able to defend that answer weeks later. Normain is built for exactly that, with the source attached to every insight, so the work stands up to scrutiny and the team is free to focus on judgment rather than page turning."

— Sara Landfors, CEO and co-founder of Normain

Two markets, one direction

The UK is not the only place we are investing. We recently joined the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in New York, where we already work with customers, and the picture on both sides of the Atlantic is the same. The demand for trusted, structured insights from complex documents is growing fastest in the markets where the stakes are highest, and we intend to meet it in both.

Try it on one workflow

You do not need a big programme to see whether this works. Pick the one process your team dreads, the recurring analysis that swallows the most hours, and let us run it through Normain with you. If you are a UK firm, or you will be at an SCC event this season, get in touch. We would love to talk.

Deepening our presence in a market where we already work with customers, and inviting more US firms to join them.

Normain is now a member of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in New York (SACCNY). Founded in 1906, SACCNY is the oldest international chamber of commerce for Swedish business, and for well over a century it has helped Swedish companies grow in the United States. Joining its network of more than 250 members puts us in good company, and it reflects where we are heading: a deeper and more visible presence in a market where we are already active.

Much of that momentum comes from the customers we already work with in the United States. They are the reason we are leaning in further, and SACCNY gives us more ways to reach firms like them, firms ready for a better approach to their most demanding document work.

"Joining SACCNY is a commitment, both to the US customers who already trust us and to the many firms we have not met yet. It gives us a place in one of the most important business communities in the world and a faster way to put Normain in front of the teams who need it. We are here to build for the long term."

— Sara Landfors, CEO and co-founder of Normain

Why this matters for the firms we work with

If your firm handles due diligence, audit, regulatory compliance or any work where a mountain of documents has to become a defensible answer, this is a good moment to talk to us. We are expanding our US footprint deliberately, and the firms that come in now help shape how the product works for their market. They get closer access to our team, hands-on support getting their first use cases live, and a head start their competitors will feel later.

The pattern we see is consistent. The firms who adopt this kind of capability early build a lead that is hard to close. They spend far less time on the parts of the work that never should have taken so long, they free their senior people to focus on the judgment only they can provide, and they answer client questions with a speed and a paper trail others cannot match. That last point matters commercially. Firms that turn a hard question around quickly, and back every answer with its source, win more of the work they pitch for.

"The firms moving on this now are building a genuine advantage. Every answer is traceable, every insight is defensible, and the hours they save go straight back into the work only their people can do. I would much rather firms discover that with us early than spend next year catching up."

— Sara Landfors, CEO and co-founder of Normain

A simple first step

Getting started is easy. Bring us the one workflow your team dreads, the recurring analysis that eats the most hours, and we will show you what Normain does with it. If you are a US firm, or you will be at a SACCNY event this season, reach out. We would love to talk.

Klara Consulting is rolling out Normain across its offices to give its accountants a faster and more consistent way to perform the document-heavy quality reviews at the core of the firm, with every conclusion traceable back to the source it came from.

Normain today announced that Klara Consulting, one of Sweden's fast-growing accounting and advisory groups, is adopting Normain to standardise and scale the quality review work that underpins its client engagements. Built through the acquisition of accounting bureaus across the country, Klara Consulting now operates close to 30 offices, and is using Normain to bring a single, consistent review method to all of them.

The work at the centre of the rollout is the review of income tax declarations and financial statements: annual reports, balance and income statements, share registers and the official tax authority forms that go with them. Klara's domain experts define what a correct review looks like, setting the controls and the materiality thresholds that decide which findings are worth a consultant's time, and Normain applies that standard across every client file, linking each conclusion back to the exact document and page it came from.

For Klara Consulting, the appeal is consistency and control rather than only speed, which directly translates to best-in-class quality for their clients. As the group has grown through acquisition, every office has brought its own way of working. A shared method that runs the same checks the same way across all of them, with results that can be traced and stood behind, lets the firm raise quality across the practice without taking judgment away from the people who own it.

“We didn’t want to hand the review over to a machine, but to take the standard our best people already work with, and apply it consistently across every office,” said Martin Sandstedt, Klara Consulting. “We define the controls and how they should be interpreted, and Normain does the reading and cross-checking against the sources. That frees our accountants to focus on the insights that truly matter.”

The rollout also opens up uses beyond the review itself. Klara is building toward aggregated quality statistics across its business areas and offices, so it can see where issues cluster, and toward using the tool to guide more junior staff by showing not just what was flagged but why it matters and what to do next.

"We've grown by bringing great firms together. Normain is how they can now work as one, with the same quality and deep expertise for every client." said Victoria Thore, CEO of Klara Consulting.

“Klara Consulting holds a high bar for the work that goes out under its name, and that is exactly the kind of firm we built Normain for,” said Sara Landfors, CEO and Co-founder of Normain. “They keep control of the judgment, and we make sure the manual reading and verification stops being the bottleneck. Seeing it roll out across their offices, on real client files, is the strongest proof that it works.”

About Normain

Normain builds source-verified AI for professional services and other regulated environments where accuracy and accountability are not optional. The platform lets domain experts define what good looks like and applies that judgment across large volumes of documents, with every output traceable to its source. Normain is built on Microsoft Azure and available through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. The company was founded by Sara Landfors, Dennis Landfors and Kalle Hansson and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Professional services teams can request a walkthrough at normain.com.

About Klara Consulting

Klara Consulting is one of Sweden's leading providers of financial services to small, medium-sized and growing companies. From 26 offices across Sweden, its more than 600 authorised accounting and payroll consultants serve over 6,000 customers with accounting, payroll and HR, audit, advisory, and recruitment and interim staffing. Klara Consulting is an authorised agency through Srf konsulterna and works to the Swedish Rex and Salk standards. The company is headquartered in Stockholm and is part of the Nordic Rantalainen Group. Learn more at klaraconsulting.se.

This is a repost of Microsoft’s original article, featured here.

Increasingly, enterprises are looking for AI solutions that can deliver consistent, verifiable insights to inform high-stakes decisions. And that’s especially true for our  target audience: advisory consulting firms and enterprise teams that specialize in areas such as governance, risk, compliance, audit, and assurance.

Operating in semi-regulated industries, these teams have extremely high requirements for precision in AI-generated output. Any AI solution they deploy must solve complex business problems at scale and provide insights that can be traced back to their source.

Our ‘Extractional AI’ is built for that purpose. But we  had reached a critical inflection point: we  had a great product, but needed help scaling it—and positioning it—to prospective enterprise clients.

“Building our product on Azure and positioning Normain on Microsoft Marketplace with other AI models has just been such a commercial facilitator for us. We’ve won contracts from major corporations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”

– Sara Landfors, Co-founder & CEO, Normain

Building trust to spark new customer conversations 

Our  goal was clear: we wanted to make the  platform enterprise-ready and enhance our  visibility in the market. We  chose Microsoft Azure as the foundation to help achieve that.

Being able to say that our  platform was built on Microsoft was a way to gain instant trust. 

As Normain’s Co-founder and CEO, Sara Landfors explains, “At its core, we sell trust. Backing that with Microsoft's trusted infrastructure and brand has been a game-changer for us. “

We  worked with Microsoft to maximize a vital part of our  platform: security. This involved ensuring it was fully compliant and that any data a customer inputted into the platform remained entirely private to their business.

The enhanced brand trust, combined with investments in the security architecture, gave us  something critical: the ability to reassure potential new clients in a risk-averse sector. In fact, it helped open the door to conversations with major customers that may never have happened, including global accounting firm, KPMG.

Taking solution features to the next level

Microsoft has also supported Normain with a series of additional product enhancements. This included optimizing how our  platform analyzed and processed documents using Azure Document Intelligence—a cloud-based tool that uses AI to extract fields, text, and data from documents and forms.

As Normain’s CTO Kalle Hansson highlights, “Azure gave us the infrastructure to build at enterprise scale. The security posture is strong and we could move fast. We were able to go from decision to production in days.”

We have also seen  major improvements in the  platform that greatly enhanced the user experience. These included at least a 10X improvement in document processing speed and a significant increase in our  throughput capabilities. 

“Azure gave us the infrastructure to build at enterprise scale. The security posture is strong and we could move fast. We were able to go from decision to production in days.”

– Kalle Hansson, Chief Technology Officer, Normain

Building a foundation for future success 

Given the highly-regulated industries we work with, trust is everything. Our  investments in security upgrades gave us a compelling story to tell enterprise clients about data protection and reliability.

The capability improvements to Normain’s ‘Extractional AI’ also directly led to customer benefits. Our  customers have reported operational improvements, including reduced dependency on engineering or prompt experts, 50-80% faster time-to-insight, and the ability to trace every insight back to its source, speeding up internal reviews and external audits.

Dennis Landfors, Chief Operating Officer at Normain, also references the kinds of enterprise contracts that Normain is now able to win. “The Microsoft Marketplace presence and the security upgrades together are opening doors that were closed to us just a year ago.”  It’s a point echoed by Sara Landfors, who notes, “Building our product on Azure and positioning Normain on Microsoft Marketplace with other AI models has just been such a commercial facilitator for us. We’ve won contracts from major corporations that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”

In terms of direct business benefits, we have seen  a 250% increase in annual revenue. Normain now also has  the security and trust foundation needed to fuel our  global expansion.

Having been able to scale our  product, improve technical capabilities, and enhance security, Normain continues to build our  reputation in the AI industry and pursue major commercial opportunities.

“The Microsoft Marketplace presence and the security upgrades together are opening doors that were closed to us just a year ago.”

– Dennis Landfors, Chief Operating Officer, Normain

Today, Normain is launching its API. For the first time, the analysis that has always lived inside the Normain platform can run directly inside the systems our customers already work in.

The engine behind Extractional AI

Since launch, Normain has been the engine for Extractional AI, a system built specifically to produce structured, verifiable answers from complex source material. Teams bring in the documents that underpin their work, define the analysis they need, and receive results in which every answer traces back to the exact sources they came from. The outputs are reproducible, the sources are attached, and every step is auditable. Teams in GRC, audit, assurance, and advisory rely on that engine for exactly the kind of high-stakes, judgment-heavy analysis where their reputations are on the line.

That engine is not changing. It is the foundation everything in Normain runs on. The API simply opens a new door to it.

Today, Normain runs where you work

Until now, reaching that engine meant opening Normain. The API turns it into something your own software can call. A team can create a secure space for a set of documents, push those documents in straight from the systems they already run on, and run the same deep, cross-document analysis they would run in the app, all in plain language. The result comes back structured and fully sourced, ready for their own product, pipeline, or internal tools to act on, with every answer still tracing back to the exact passage it came from.

"The API is how Normain becomes part of the systems our customers build their work on, not just a tool they open. The same precision, the same sourcing, and the same standard of trust, now available wherever the work actually happens."
— Sara Landfors, CEO of Normain

Built for the teams that depend on it

A contract review team can connect its document pipeline to Normain, so every new agreement is analysed against the regulations and standards that govern it the moment it arrives, with the sourced result delivered straight back into their own platform. A compliance team can route incoming policy documents through Normain automatically and pull structured findings into the system they already track their work in. A diligence team can run the same cross-document analysis across an entire data room from inside their own tooling. In each case the engine and the standard of trust are the same. What changes is where the analysis runs.

Try it now

We are rolling the API out to a select group of customers first. If you want your team to be among them, reach out to our sales team and we will walk you through the commercial and technical details.

Today, Normain is launching projects and workflows. This is the second major release in less than a week, and it is the biggest update we have ever made to Normain.

Two years of fine-tuning Extractional AI

Since launch, Normain has been the engine for Extractional AI: a system built specifically to produce structured, verifiable answers from complex source material. Teams upload the documents that underpin their work, define the structure of the analysis they need, and receive insights where everything traces back to the exact source it came from. The outputs are reproducible, the sources are attached, and every step of the process is auditable.

Teams in audit, compliance, sustainability, and advisory have relied on that engine to handle the kind of complex analysis where their reputations are on the line. Where general-purpose conversational tools fall short on reliability and verifiability, Normain has built precisely the opposite: a system designed for high-stakes structured work, where every answer can be traced, reproduced, and defended.

That engine is not changing. It is the foundation everything in Normain runs on.

Today we go end-to-end

Today, we are taking that engine to an entirely new level. With the launch of Normain Workflows, it’s now possible to chain extractions together.  Previously, a project could only consist of one extraction, that is, one single structured analysis. Now, with this new launch, it can contain a sequence of as many steps as the work requires: multiple analyses building on each other, team-input steps where reviewers add context or sign-off, and final deliverables generated directly from the results of earlier steps. The steps can sit in any order, and any step is able to read from the outputs of any previous step. 

This is the biggest leap Extractional AI has taken since we built the engine itself. For our customers, this means more AI power inside every engagement, simpler set up, and fully scalable workflows running end to end inside Normain. Human review enters only where the work actually needs it.

"This is the moment Normain went end-to-end. The same precision and the same standard of trust our customers depend on, now spanning everything real expert work  contains, from the first analysis to the final deliverable."
— Sara Landfors, CEO of Normain

From the first analysis to the final deliverable

A project in Normain can now mirror the actual shape of the work, however complex. Let’s look at three examples

Regulatory gap analysis
Start in Normain by pulling every relevant rule change from a source document, e.g. a regulatory update.Then, set up a second extraction to compare the client's current policies against those changes. Lastly, let Normain produce two final deliverables: a gap-analysis memo for the engagement team, and a client-facing summary as a Word document.

Peer benchmarking
A peer benchmark works the same way.In order to compare one company against thirty of its peers on a topic like climate disclosures or governance practices, create an extraction that pulls the comparable data from each peer's report. Set up a final deliverable to bring everything together into a benchmark report.

Internal audit
An internal audit fits the same logic. First, take the firm's annual audit plan and produce a planning memo for the specific audit. Secondly, create an extraction that builds the detailed audit program. Third, let Normain populate that program with evidence from steering documents, interview notes, and other inputs, leaving the audit team with documented analysis and audit evidence ready for reporting. A final extraction step maps the identified observations into a draft report, with each observation written up as a description, risk, and recommendation.

This is just scratching the surface. Normain is highly flexible and configurable for any type of expert work that requires document analysis.

In every case, a single project holds the entire sequence. Every step is traceable, every output is verifiable, and every source attached. The chat, the conversational interface we launched last week, also sits across the whole project. It is aware of every step and the data inside it and can configure new steps, summarize earlier results or extend the workflow on demand. What used to live across a patchwork of exports, handoffs, and lost context now lives inside one Normain project.

See it for yourself

Projects and workflows are live for all Normain users from today. To try it on a real project of your own, get started on Normain for free here.

Today, Normain is launching  the chat. This is the biggest update to Normain since our launch.

For teams in audit, compliance, sustainability, and other high-stakes fields, this is a significant shift in how a Normain extraction comes together. Defining the right questions, configuring the right columns, mapping the structure of an analysis to what the work actually requires. All of that now happens through a single conversation.

A conversational layer on top of Extractional AI

Chat in Normain is not a chatbot, and it does not function the way conversational AI has been used elsewhere in the industry.

It is a conversational interface that sits on top of the same deterministic, structured engine that has always powered the Normain product. When a user describes a piece of work in chat, the system does not generate an answer. It builds a real Normain extraction, with the questions, columns, and instructions configured according to the request, and then runs that extraction through the engine the way any extraction has always been run.

The output is what the output has always been in Normain. Each result is traceable to the source paragraph it came from. Sortable, filterable, and exportable. The same audit trail Normain customers have come to rely on.

What changes is how that structure gets built.

"This is the biggest update we have ever shipped to Normain. It is also the moment we start to deliver fully on the vision we set out with: making Extractional AI accessible to every expert team that needs it. Our customers have always had extraordinarily high expectations of Normain, and we are thrilled to be meeting them with chat."

—Sara Landfors, CEO of Normain

Why structure still comes first

The Precision Manifesto identified four failure modes of conversational AI for serious work. Unreliable. Unpredictable. Unverifiable. Unrepeatable. Those failure modes remain the reason teams in audit, compliance, and sustainability cannot stake their reputations on general-purpose chat tools.

Chat in Normain is not subject to those failure modes because the conversation does not produce the output. It only configures the engine that does.

The engine remains more  deterministic than the chat. The sources remain attached to every answer. The same instructions, run through the same configuration, produce the same result.

The conversation is the interface. The structure is what it has always been.

Check it out now

Chat is live for all Normain users from today. Watch it in action here.

To try it for yourself, get started on Normain for free.

The most valuable thing AI can do is not to replace expertise, but to multiply it.  Black Sun Global has spent over 20  years developing a proprietary annual report benchmarking methodology that sets the standard for how listed companies understand their position relative to peers. Normain is now the engine that accelerates it.

Black Sun Global is one of the UK's leading stakeholder engagement consultancies, advising listed companies on how they report, communicate, and position themselves with stakeholders. A deep understanding of the competitive space is a crucial foundation: reading, extracting, and comparing data across hundreds of annual reports to help clients understand where they stand relative to peers.

The challenge is not just volume, but complexity. Annual reports distill 12 months of performance, programmes and strategy into a single volume running to hundreds of pages of data and narrative disclosures. Tracking themes, extracting comparable data points, and doing so consistently across a large universe of companies demands expertise, precision, and significant time. For years, this was a manual process.

“Normain is a force multiplier. It isn’t a productivity hack - it’s a controllable, rigorous, traceable AI tool that amplifies the value our reporting and communications experts can build for our clients. Normain allows us to multiply decades of human insight by the scale and speed of AI.”

—Ian Roe, CEO, Black Sun Global

The competitive advantage Ian describes is built on an operational shift. Within days of onboarding, Black Sun's research analysts were working directly inside Normain, applying their proprietary methodology at a level of granular control, speed and verification the manual process simply could not support. The platform handles large PDF files without restriction, including annual reports filled with graphics, tables and charts, with no workflow compromises.

"A 35% reduction in research time per benchmark wasn't something we dared to hope for when we introduced Normain. We were wrong to doubt it! We can now extract, cross-reference, and verify data across hundreds of data points in the time it used to take to process a handful."

—Nadya Kamenkovich, Black Sun Global

The "extract with sources" capability proved particularly valuable for this work, where traceability matters as much as the finding itself. For a consultancy whose reputation rests on the integrity of its analysis, being able to show precisely where every data point originates is not a nice-to-have. It is table stakes.

Multiple analysts across the Black Sun team now use Normain daily. What began as a single use case is becoming a core part of how the team delivers its research, at a quality and scale that was not previously possible.

This is what Normain was built for: not to replace expert judgement, but to give it more reach.

Running FTSE 100-scale benchmarking manually? Book a demo to see what your team could do with Normain.