Advisory for the age of intelligence
AI, adopted with intention.
We are an advisory house for small and medium businesses in maritime, agriculture and managed IT services. We translate the noise of artificial intelligence into a small number of deliberate moves — compliant with the EU AI Act from day one, and delivered as a platform you own outright.
Three industries
Maritime, agriculture, and the MSPs serving smaller businesses.
We deliberately serve organisations without the budget for an expensive enterprise AI platform — including the managed service providers who look after them.
Regulation
Ready for the EU AI Act from day one.
We help you understand what the EU AI Act — and the privacy rules around it — actually require of a business your size, then build those obligations into the design instead of retrofitting them after a pilot. Classification, transparency, human review, register and a named owner: in place before anything goes live.
Our governance positionOwnership
We build your IP, not ours.
- We develop intellectual property for our clients, not for ourselves. There is no VDB IS product to licence.
- Code, prompts, evaluation sets, configured or fine-tuned models, datasets and documentation are the client's property from the first day of work.
- Everything is built and deployed inside your own cloud tenancy, under your accounts and repositories.
- Written IP assignment and a handover pack are part of every implementation contract, not an added extra.
01 — €2,500
AI Readiness Assessment
Discovering the AI use-cases that are worth your money.
View service
02 — From €7,500
Guided Implementation
From chosen use-case to something your team actually uses.
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03 — From €1,200 / month
Retained Advisory
A standing seat at your table as your ambition grows.
View serviceFour weeks
From first conversation to a costed roadmap.
No vendor ties
Independent counsel. We sell no software.
Owner-level
Every engagement is led, not delegated.
Client work
All engagementsMaritime
900
Hours returned per year
Reclaiming 900 office hours a year from voyage documentation
Agriculture
4 hrs
Median pack preparation
From five days to four hours on a certification and traceability pack
MSPs & IT Service Providers
38 min
Saved per engineer shift
An owned triage platform instead of a per-seat AI licence
Latest insights
All insightsOwnership — 6 min
Own the platform, not the licence
We develop intellectual property for our clients, not for ourselves. Every model, every line of code and every dataset ends up under your ownership.
Adoption — 6 min
Most AI pilots fail for boring reasons
It is almost never the model. It is unclear ownership, a use-case nobody asked for, and no measurement of what changed.
Assessment — 5 min
What an AI readiness assessment should actually produce
If the deliverable is a maturity score and a slide about the art of the possible, you have bought a brochure.
Begin here — €2,500
Book an AI Readiness Assessment.
Four weeks of use-case discovery inside your business, closing with a prioritised, costed roadmap.
Request a timeThe method
The VDB IS Readiness Index — four stages, one decision at the end.
01
Map
How the work actually gets done.
02
Score
Every candidate use-case, on the same four axes.
03
Cost
Money in, money out, in writing.
04
Govern
Ownership before deployment.
Use-case library
Start from a job, not a tool.
Maritime
AI for quotation and estimation
Can AI write our first-draft quotes?
Cross-sector
AI for invoice and document processing
Can AI handle our inbound invoices and paperwork?
Cross-sector
AI for customer service triage
Can AI answer our routine customer contacts?
Cross-sector
AI for catalogue and product content
Can AI write and translate our product data?
Cross-sector
AI for document triage in professional services
Can AI do our first-pass reading?
Maritime
AI for maintenance knowledge retrieval
Can AI capture what our retiring operators know?
Common questions
What people ask first.
- How much does an AI readiness assessment cost?
- €2,500 excluding VAT, fixed. Four weeks, and the fee does not move once the scope is agreed in writing.
- Do you resell software?
- No. We hold no reseller agreements and take no vendor commission, which is why our tooling shortlists can be trusted.
- How small is too small?
- Below roughly ten people the assessment is usually more rigour than the decision warrants. We will say so, and point you at a shorter introductory call instead.
- Who owns the output?
- You do, outright. The register, the roadmap, the governance artefacts and anything we build — code, prompts, models and data — are your intellectual property. We do not sell or licence our own platform.
- Do you help with the EU AI Act?
- Yes, and it is not a separate workstream. Every use-case is classified against the Act before it is costed, with transparency obligations, the AI register and a named owner in place from day one rather than retrofitted after a pilot.
- Which industries do you focus on?
- Three: maritime, agriculture, and managed service providers serving SMBs and small enterprises. Those are the sectors where we can be specific rather than generic.
- What if we cannot afford an enterprise AI platform?
- That is exactly who we build for. Instead of an enterprise licence, we develop a right-sized platform you own and can extend — which is usually cheaper over three years than renting seats.
- Will you tell us not to adopt AI?
- Regularly. Where the honest first step is data reconciliation or a process fix, that is what the report will recommend.
- Do you work outside the Netherlands?
- Yes, across the EU and the UK. Remote by default, on site for the interview weeks where distance allows.