I trained to run a business. Computing was my hobby.

The business was part of family life.

I grew up preparing to take over a family-owned industrial company. I studied industrial engineering, naval engineering, law and occupational health and safety, and completed a doctorate. When my father retired, I took on the task of continuing the business.

That education shapes how I make decisions. I’m interested in what a solution can do technically, but also in how it is sold, what it means for people and how it fits the way a company works.

I also learnt how to bring customers in.

Before joining the industrial company, I spent ten years in a hospitality business. That is where I learnt search engine optimisation and digital marketing, competing for visibility with platforms such as Booking and Expedia.

I later applied that experience to a specialist industrial B2B market. Thinking about how a customer finds a product, understands it and decides to buy became part of the way I worked.

I have also worked on board a container ship and experienced local government from the inside during four years as a councillor on a town council. These different settings taught me to consider operations, people and the rules they work within.

The ERP was a Ferrari that never got out of first gear.

We had put a great deal of effort into improving machinery and processes. Yet entering data into the ERP and then getting the information we needed out of it still took too much effort.

I had ideas for changing that, but turning each one into a software project felt like a burden. I started building tools around the way we worked: connecting information, making use of patterns and avoiding starting from scratch on repeated tasks.

AI helped me move much faster with development. Not always by having an AI perform the final task, but also by helping me build software to do it.

The robots came long before Vailet.

I have enjoyed computing and robotics since childhood. Long before working with AI, I was buying robot dogs from the United States and experimenting with programming them.

I still make room for experiments. One is Franz, a robot I use to explore guiding an operator to where the parts sit in the warehouse, assisting with the picking of an order. It points out where they are; it does not pick them up.

For me, AI has connected that curiosity with the ability to put many more ideas into practice. Not every experiment needs to become a service.

From improving my own business to helping others.

As people saw how our way of working was changing, they began asking why I didn’t help other companies do something similar. I decided to try. That was the beginning of Vailet.

I want a business owner to be able to sit down with me, explain a concern or an ambition and explore the possibilities without bringing a written software specification.

I like building, testing and improving. I have also learnt not to make decisions in the heat of the moment. Moving quickly and giving yourself time to think are not incompatible.

A business conversation that can become a working project.

I lead the work and draw on a network of professionals I have collaborated with for years. Depending on what the project needs, we can build the solution ourselves or work with your company’s existing team and providers.

The aim is not to put AI everywhere. It is to choose where it can help, when another kind of software is enough and how to bring that improvement into everyday work.