Hans van Leijen

Over mij

My fascination with Artificial Intelligence ignited at university, where I specialized in Cognitive AI. I started my career as a knowledge engineer building rule-based systems for financial risk assessment. This early experience provided deep insights into leveraging AI for critical business functions. But the technology was still maturing, so I pivoted into business consultancy. At McKinsey, I truly found my stride in technology strategy consulting, serving as an Engagement Manager and trusted advisor to diverse clients. I led large-scale transformations for financial services and utility companies, including Lean Operations programs where I directly coached leadership to achieve daily improvements. This period built my expertise in driving tangible business outcomes through technology and operational excellence. My journey continued at TomTom, where I was responsible for critical online applications for identity & access management, e-commerce, device logistics, content publishing, and application integration. I developed analytics and large data warehouse solutions, particularly for marketing campaign optimization. I led our core application integration platform, enabling automation of business processes end-to-end with our customers and partners. I took pride in managing our webshop, delivering both shippable and digital consumer products in 35 locales, and ensuring seamless web content management and critical map data delivery pipelines. We delivered 24/7 online traffic services for millions of personal and in-dash navigation systems, under stringent Automotive SLAs, from our hubs in Netherlands, India, and Ukraine. I also significantly grew the size and capabilities of our teams in India, and implemented a Scaled Agile way of working. In past years, I've spearheaded major change programs for legacy reduction and modernization: a large-scale Azure cloud migration, a comprehensive overhaul of our Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) platform, and the deployment of a GenAI-driven translation platform. My efforts also ensured strict IT security standards adherence across dozens of customer-facing applications. Today, I’m excited to return to my AI roots. The objective remains – significantly improve business performance – but the tools are now unimaginably more powerful. My focus is on GenAI implementation strategies, drive top-down redesign, GenAI-driven analytics, context engineering for agents, and spec-driven agentic coding. My experience in transformation, analytics, application integration and AI positions me uniquely for this.