Keynotes
Someone on my team once said to me: your name is mentioned most during dinner. Not in meetings. At kitchen tables, in the evening, in houses I have never been to.
That is the real size of the job, and it is why I keep getting on stages. I love the room. People who are, for that hour, fully present and open to thinking differently.
I have led teams for thirty years, in small organisations and very large ones. I have had good leaders and I have had poor ones, and I learned about as much from the second group. The examples I use are things that happened to me, not case studies.
I talk about the future of work, about leadership in times of AI, and about how you build a place where people feel safe enough to say the true thing and are still expected to deliver.
Entrepreneurs, executives, young leaders, whole departments. Nearly everyone in those rooms has their name said at a table tonight.
Leadership in times of AI
AI is a mirror. It amplifies what you already have. If the strategy is unclear, AI makes the confusion faster.
This keynote is the one to start with, if AI is still new to your leadership team.
Four challenges, and a set of questions to ask yourself after each one.
Lead AI. Don't let AI lead you.
Rethink jobs, talent and how you organise.
Treasure trust and culture.
Safeguard your reputation.
If people don't trust you, they will not trust your AI either.
Available in three versions: for boards, for leadership teams and for all employees. In English or Dutch.
STEMpathy, the skill of the future
Girls in STEM. Where are you?
Four out of five bottleneck professions in Flanders are STEM professions. Flanders sits at the bottom of the OECD for the share of STEM graduates. And by the age of six, many girls already believe that boys are smarter than they are.
That last one is learned. Girls are handed fewer blocks. Spatial reasoning is the strongest predictor we have of how a child does in STEM later on, and it is shaped in a kindergarten building corner, not at university admissions.
The rest of the system does not help. Teachers are missing, and schools still work from a statute written in the 1960s. The children who lose most are the girls, and the ones whose parents cannot fill the gap at home.
So I talk about what moves it. Role models, because what you can see, you can be. Schools and companies tied together locally and permanently, not project by project. School leaders with enough autonomy to act on what is in front of them.
STEMpathy is a word I made up. STEM and empathy. A plea for policy and leadership with head and heart, because in a world shaped by AI, STEM without empathy no longer exists. I chair STEM Platform Vlaanderen, the expert group that advises the Flemish minister of Education. In Dutch or English.
Leading in the Age of Agentic AI (New!)
A year ago we talked about what AI could answer. Now we talk about what it does on its own, while nobody is watching. Agents decide, book, approve, escalate. This keynote is for organisations that already use AI and want to know what changes when it starts acting on its own. I use those tools myself, every day. I read the research. I spoke to companies that have put real money into agents.
The talk has four chapters.
Clarity. An agent needs what a new hire needs. A clear strategy, a clear picture of what success looks like, and the context that normally lives in the heads of people who have been there long enough to know. Nobody ever had to write that part down before.
Cost and value. Agents are not free. Very few companies can tell you what one workflow costs to run once, never mind a hundred thousand times. That is the number you need on the day someone proposes replacing people with agents.
Change. An agent does not land in one place. It lands in governance, in your processes, in the organisation, in your data, and in who is accountable for what. Most programmes touch two of those and then wonder why nothing sticks.
Culture and care. The anxiety is real, and it is mostly not about robots taking jobs. Ask twenty-seven thousand workers across thirty-five markets and almost half say AI pays off for the company and not for them. That is a fairness question, and no adoption dashboard measures it.
Leading was never about the what. Always about the how. Agents have not changed that.
Available in three versions: for boards, for leadership teams and for all employees. In English or Dutch.