Why I do this
I believe everyone can find work that fits.
Not one perfect job for life, but work that makes sense at a particular moment and leaves room to grow. This is the personal story behind that belief.
Not one perfect job for life, but work that makes sense at a particular moment and leaves room to grow. This is the personal story behind that belief.
For years, I thought better work was mainly a design challenge: the right structure, incentives and technology. Then my body forced me to stop. Burnout could not be solved with a better model.
What I learned was simple and uncomfortable. People are not resources to optimise. We have limits. We need meaning. And we do our best work when we feel seen. That experience made me more patient in change work and more honest on stage.
The entrepreneurial itch showed up early: I started my first little IT company at sixteen. My career proper started at TU Delft. While finishing my degree, I joined Alares in 2005, an innovation and organisational consultancy. That is where I learned how organisations look at change. In 2014 I decided to stop merely advising on organising differently, and to build it myself instead.
With Part-up I built a marketplace where work revolved around tasks and contributions, not job titles. In 2017 that work earned the Finext New Organising Award, and we spoke in the Dutch House of Representatives about the platform economy. More importantly: every day we saw that people who “didn’t fit” on paper delivered excellent work once you looked at tasks and talent instead of CVs.
Those years confirmed what I had only sensed intuitively before: the problem is rarely the people. It’s how we organise, describe and divide work. In December 2021 Part-up was acquired by Amplooi, part of Prevermo. A fitting close, and immediately the reason to look for something new.
I am a father of three sons. My youngest folds animals and shapes from a single sheet of paper that I would never have seen in it myself. His room is full of origami.
The sheet does not become more. A different fold reveals what was already there. That is how I think about talent. People do not always need to become someone else before they can contribute more. Often, we need to get better at seeing what is already there.
Unfold the potential.
At 8vance I saw, for the first time, technology that could do at scale what Part-up was still trying to do by hand: make visible the talent organisations can’t see themselves. AI that looks past job titles and CVs, and matches on tasks, skills and potential. In healthcare, government, education and large organisations, I see the results every day: the baker who becomes an EV charging technician, the nurse who turns out to fit a role nobody had imagined for her.
That’s why I became Chief Evangelist, and why I keep speaking about it: not because AI is the newest toy, but because it finally makes possible what should have been fair all along, the best person for every job, and the best job for every person.
The quality of our society is largely determined by the quality of the matches we make: between people and work, between talent and organisations, between who someone is and what they could still become. Most systems look at the past: diplomas, job titles, years of experience. I believe we should look at potential.
That’s the common thread running through my work, my book The Art of Matching, and every keynote I give.
I’m not a techno-optimist who believes AI solves everything on its own. But I am convinced AI forces us to finally make honest choices about how we organise work. Automate where it genuinely adds value. Protect the work that depends on human judgement, attention and responsibility.
That tension, between acceleration and humanity, is exactly what I speak about on stages and inside organisations. Not as a scare story, but as an assignment: responsible AI sometimes means moving faster, not slower.
Laurens connects technology and people, creating space for open conversation and new perspectives.
Work is bigger than jobs.
Potential matters more than the past.
Organisations are human systems.
AI should strengthen human value, not diminish it.
Change begins when people feel seen and taken seriously.
Technology accelerates. Good leadership helps people move with it.
I’m happy to tailor it to your organisation, sector and audience.
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