Rickard Eriksson, the IT pioneer who built the world's first social medium in 1996, trained over 7,000 businesses and public sector organisations in AI, and founded EuroWork
The story of the man who created the first social platform before Facebook, trained thousands in AI, and built EuroWork for SMEs and the public sector.
The boy with the modem
Rickard Eriksson is one of the few people who helped build the Swedish internet before most people even knew it existed. In 1996, the same year many Swedish homes got their first internet connection, he created what became LunarStorm: the world鈥檚 first social medium, with millions of users long before Facebook arrived. Two million Swedes grew up digitally there, with guestbooks, status updates, and friend lists, a whole decade ahead of everyone else.
The company behind LunarStorm was called LunarWorks. The one he runs today is called EuroWork. Some patterns stick around.
The teacher
What sets Rickard apart from many other tech pioneers is what he did next: he started teaching. Through his training company Nischad Utbildning, he and his colleagues have trained people from over 7,000 businesses and public sector organisations in AI and digital communication, from the entire staff of small companies to leadership teams in government agencies.
After enough training sessions, one pattern became impossible to ignore. AI was already being used everywhere, but quietly: contracts pasted into personal accounts to understand a clause, reports with personal data uploaded for a quick summary, almost always because the workday was too short. And no one could answer the simple follow-up question: where did that data actually go?
The most common thing he encountered wasn鈥檛 someone who wanted to ban AI. It was someone who wanted to say yes without feeling guilty about it.
EuroWork
That鈥檚 what EuroWork was built for: a shared AI workplace for European businesses and public sector organisations, where the rules are set by the organisation, not by individuals. All processing happens within the EU, the cost is visible next to every answer, every AI response is clearly marked as such, and the AI agent shows its plan and waits for human approval.
The principle is the same as in 1996: technology people want to use does more than technology people are told to use.
EuroWork is run by EuroWork AB. Rickard lives and works in Varberg. He writes all the blog posts himself, in Swedish, after which they鈥檙e translated into the service鈥檚 other 34 languages using AI, with a clear footnote about it under each post.
Contact
You can reach Rickard at rickard@eurowork.ai. For talks and training, see nischadutbildning.com.