Shaping Europe's Future State

Our way of working is to sit down with the client to lay bare the problem they're facing and to understand it as clearly as possible. It isn't our industry, so we have to make a real effort there.

Once the problem is clear, we start building straight away, to make it visual and to gather feedback on it. From there, we can scale up as quickly as possible to turn it into a scalable digital solution.

This way of working has proven successful with several clients in different industries. We're also absolutely convinced that we can roll it out further, at scale, to every industry, I'd say. We know there are big challenges in various industries, and we'd like to provide the solutions to them.

Ten years ago, building was still done the traditional way: you needed a large, heavyweight build team and a long financial runway. Today, a much smaller group of AI-native experts can do it in a fraction of that time.

More and more small solutions are being added instead of one big whole, so there's a separate solution for everything and nothing talks to each other. Anyone who switches between five screens every day will recognise this. It actually makes things busier rather than better.

A solution for one company is very expensive. A solution for a hundred companies is affordable. So we also always look at scalability: where a problem is widespread in an industry, we want to solve it for the whole sector.

What you often see is that the solutions that exist today are set up too broadly. It really comes down to the exact context of what's needed in order to tailor the solutions. That's often where there's a very big mismatch, and that's where it goes wrong.

What does that say about other fields? If you look at the blueprint of the solution we're building, what many organisations struggle with, what causes them pain, is that data and information are scattered everywhere: across different systems, and also in different people's heads. As a result, a process often takes longer, creates more work, or ends up resting with a single person or a single part of the business.

What we do in our blueprint is make sure all the information comes together in one place, so that everyone immediately has exactly the same information and can act at the highest level. Ultimately, it's about quality. The higher the quality, the less rework you have and the faster you can move.

What it means for people is productivity. You used to spend a lot of time on research and validation, the background research, making contact and drafting the documents. You now see that in the time it takes: the pace is much higher. As a result, you can apply your expertise precisely where you can make the difference.

This development has a big impact in some ways, and little in others. What has stayed the same? In an organisation, you have work processes, you have technology and you have people.

So what has changed a lot? Much more is shifting towards technology, which means that you, as a person, can add more value to the client experience.

We believe that stacking up standalone solutions from the market often leads to more problems and overhead, so the value you create disappears completely. A good example of this is The Sourcing Engine, in which we've fully centralised the recruitment process.

What used to happen across five screens would disappear into emails and get stuck in different technologies, so the data no longer had one central source of truth. We've brought all of that back into one solution that drives the recruitment process from start to finish.

It represents the client side and the candidate side, but also the journey the recruiter takes. Together, those three journeys create a really coherent experience, which also means it lends itself very well to standardisation and to deployment at scale.

Existing systems that have to operate within a new way of working often have old foundations that don't support that new way of working. And you're dealing with technology that has to keep up and also needs to be maintained.

With new systems, that problem is much less present, because you're essentially starting from a blank sheet. That makes it easier to push innovation through and to deliver fresh value with the system.

Applications that create value are the basis for putting a good product on the market. What matters when bringing these products to market is that they really solve a problem, one that is a real problem at its core.

Many products look good and have a nice interface. They work easily and smoothly, but fundamentally they don't really solve a problem that can be tied to hard KPIs.

Our work with partners and on products is always driven by the value and the solution we can deliver, and by the quality that goes with it.