Lars Karlsson: building trust in Etteplan’s defence business, one relationship at a time 

Lars Karlsson has spent almost his entire time at Etteplan climbing through roles rather than sitting still: project manager, team manager, department manager, regional manager, and, for about the past year, Service Solution Director for Defence. 

Lars supports sales around Etteplan’s different customers and tries to find where one solution can bring value to several of them at once, rather than just adding engineering hours project by project. His own focus is the defence sector, where he spends much of his time talking to companies across Scandinavia about where Etteplan can help.

“It’s a genuinely interesting space to work in: new technology, new ways of working, and things changing fast,” he says.

Lars describes his own career less as something planned and more as something that kept happening because he said yes.

“Every time there’s an opportunity to do something, I say, I can do it,” he says. “It’s never really been my intention to have a career, that’s not what drives me, but I always got the opportunity to grow, and in every role I feel that I get a lot of trust, and I try to do the best with it.”

That same trust carries into his day-to-day work now. “I feel that people trust that I will get the work done,” he says. “I don’t have to do fourteen-hour days or whatever it is in typical corporate culture. It’s open, I can talk to people, and if I feel I have too much on my plate, or that my home life isn’t working because of work, I can just say that, and we’ll solve it somehow.”

When asked what he’s most proud of at Etteplan, Lars points to the department he helped build. His team originally worked as consultants placed at customer sites; he was tasked with building an in-house department instead, and today most of that team’s work happens in-house rather than on-site.

Getting there meant earning trust in an industry that’s very relationship-based, and that trust now brings in new projects on an ongoing basis.

“We’ve done something really special here in Linköping, that we have this competence and this trust, and we have really good employees that are really great at what they’re doing,” he says.

He calls changing that culture, more than any single project, his legacy at Etteplan. As Service Solution Director for Defence, his job is built around getting customers to trust that Etteplan already understands their world well enough to connect the dots across their business, and that’s a much easier case to make with real, in-house expertise behind it than with consultants spread thin across different sites.

Lars has competed in Brazilian jiu jitsu for 25 years, stepping back from competition in recent years. He still coaches professional MMA fighters and travels around Europe for it.

At home, his time goes to his family, his dog, and helping his daughter with her schedule. When there’s time left over, he plays music, something he used to do more of in death metal bands.

When he was still competing at an elite level, Etteplan supported that directly, giving him hours to train and a small amount of sponsorship to help cover his coach.

For Lars, AI’s biggest impact has been efficiency: faster desk research, easier analysis, and tools that handle meeting transcriptions, notes, and actions automatically. But he’s clear about where the line sits.

“AI in some ways is still stupid, and it’s not a creative force,” he says. “You need to bring the creativity, but then it’s a tool that you can use to be creative and come up with new things.”

Having spent years making music himself, Lars sees the same pattern in creative fields more broadly.

What he expects going forward is less about AI replacing people and more about freeing them to spend more time on the things humans do best: creating, imagining, and solving problems.

Asked what he’d tell someone thinking about applying to Etteplan, Lars’s advice is simple.

“Throw your heart in front of you and chase it. There’s room here to grow in different directions, and find things you didn’t expect you’d be interested in. It’s such an interesting world. Come join us and see what happens,” he concludes.