About Tom
I'm not a consultant who learned about business. I'm a business leader who discovered AI — and understands what it means for the people making the decisions.
Career
My career started on the factory floor at Deceuninck in Belgium. From there I grew through every domain of the company — supply chain, manufacturing, IT, R&D, sales, marketing, HR — to the role of CEO.
Listed company. International operations. 3,600 employees. Restructuring and rebuilding after the financial crisis.
Listed flooring group. Transformation and IPO.
Deceuninck North America. Every aspect of the business led personally — in a market where you learn fast or lose.
What that delivers
I've led companies through fundamental change. I know the dynamics of a leadership team: the resistance, the politics, and what it takes to reach a shared decision.
I now use that experience to help leadership teams navigate the next major change: AI. Not as a technology project, but as a strategic choice that affects the entire company.
Why AI
In 1990, I wrote my engineering thesis at Siemens' chip factory in Munich: AI heuristics for scheduling a prototype production line. Artificial intelligence was a promise that came too early.
More than thirty years later, I was approached by OpenAI to become one of their early test users. The reason? They had found my thesis — on AI in industrial production planning. I clicked the link, started testing, and a whole new world opened up.
What I saw wasn't just another new technology. I immediately recognised what this could mean for the business world where I had spent my entire career: faster decisions, better analyses, more efficient processes — and fundamentally different ways to organise a company.
"The engineer who researched AI heuristics in 1990 was now the business leader who saw AI finally deliver on its promise. Not as a technologist, but as someone who understands which problems AI can solve — and which it cannot."
Today
AI advisory for leadership teams of mid-sized B2B companies in the Benelux.
The Hazard Factory — VR-based safety training
Urban Crop Solutions — indoor vertical farming
MSc Electromechanical Engineering (Ghent University)
Postgraduate Management (Vlerick Business School)
The name
Kairos — the Greek word for 'the right moment'. Not too early, not too late. The moment when a decision makes all the difference.
For many companies, that moment is now.
Next step
I listen to your situation and together we assess whether — and how — an AI Strategy Workshop can make the difference for your team.
Book a Call (or just call me) →