AI Native Netherlands

From Azure Security Castles to Agentic AI in Production

Wed, Mar 4 · 7:00 PM CET

TomTom, De Ruyterkade 154, 1011 AC Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL

We are thrilled to welcome you to our 8th edition of the AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the TomTom headquarters in Amsterdam.

We’re shaking things up! We are incredibly excited to debut an interactive panel at the end of the evening. Throughout the talks, you’ll be able to submit your technical questions online in real-time. We’ll then bring our speakers together to dive deep into your specific challenges. We’re excited to try this new format with you and get the whole room involved in the conversation.

A massive thank you to our host, TomTom, for their generosity in providing the venue, food, and drinks for this evening and for supporting the Dutch AI engineering community.

We’ll cover:

• Implementing Zero Trust principles and network controls within mission-critical Azure environments.
• Scaling secure cloud foundations by mapping real-world bottlenecks and architectural "dragons."
• Adapting cloud-native patterns for the non-deterministic execution paths of AI Agents.
• Managing observability and latency challenges in production-grade MCP server deployments.
• Extracting deep technical insights from our speakers during the interactive community Q&A.

Speaker 1: Ahmed Hussien (Schuberg Philis)
Ahmed is a Mission Critical Engineer specializing in Azure security, cloud governance, and real-world architecture. Known for turning complex cloud concepts into visual stories, he builds “security castles” on stage—complete with sentinels, defenses, and a few unexpected dragons. He combines practical field experience with humor and animation-heavy presentations to make security both understandable and memorable.

After years of solving high-severity incidents, navigating Azure’s quirks, and surviving more than one cloud outage, he now shares those lessons with a mix of clarity, honesty, and a touch of comedy. His goal? Help teams build stronger Azure security foundations — one castle wall at a time.

Talk: Building the Azure Security Castle That’s Never Finished
In this high-energy, visual session, Ahmed explores Azure security as a growing medieval castle. We’ll start with a simple blueprint and expand layer by layer—uncovering Zero Trust, network controls, and storage encryption. Each "stone" of the castle appears gradually, mapping real-world bottlenecks and best practices from the field. You’ll leave with a grounded understanding of how to strengthen your AI infrastructure foundations, one stone at a time.

Speaker 2: Metin Yazici (TomTom)
Metin is a Senior Software Engineer at TomTom, where he's helping bring AI-powered agentic assistants to vehicles. From early prototypes to production-grade deployments, he's been hands-on with the challenges of making agentic AI systems reliable, fast, and observable. He spends his days building reliable, scalable infrastructure and keeping production systems healthy.

Talk: TomTom's journey towards deploying agentic products
Deploying a traditional cloud service? You can estimate resource usage from request volume. Deploying an AI agent? Not so simple. A single user query might trigger one LLM call or twelve, fan out to maps, routing, traffic, and web search APIs, and take a completely different execution path every time. This talk follows TomTom's journey from prototype to production with the AI Agent and MCP server. It covers lessons on adapting cloud-native patterns for AI, handling observability for non-deterministic flows, building fine-tuning pipelines, and chasing latency when 'fast' is unpredictable.

Agenda:

• 18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
• 18:30 — Talk #1 | Ahmed Hussien
• 19:15 — Talk #2 | Metin Yazici
• 20:00 — The Interactive Panel: Open conversation & audience Q&A
• 20:30 — Networking & more drinks
• 21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. We'll be diving into Azure Security, Agentic AI, and MCP servers, and we’d love to hear the audience's specific questions about the talks during the interactive panel.

Who is this for: Platform engineers, AI/ML engineers, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and validating reliable AI systems in production.

Where to find us: TomTom De Ruijterkade 154, 1011 AC Amsterdam, Netherlands View on Google Maps

Pattern Cards Workshop: Diagnosing & Planning Your Transformation

Tue, Mar 17 · 5:30 PM CET

Amsterdam, NL

We’re happy to announce a new edition of this workshop! It’s the same format as the previous sessions we’ve run, but due to high demand, we’re opening up another date.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: REGISTRATION & APPROVAL PROCESS ⚠️
To ensure a high-quality, hands-on experience for everyone, we are curating the guest list for this session.

Please follow these 2 steps to apply for a spot:
👉 Step 1: RSVP 'Yes' on this Meetup page.
👉 Step 2: Submit your official registration on our website.

Please Note: Due to the interactive nature of the workshop and limited capacity, registration does not automatically guarantee entry. We review every application to ensure the right mix of attendees and will send you a final confirmation email shortly if your spot is secured.

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Description
The technology landscape is in constant motion. Just as your organization masters the currents of the Cloud Native paradigm, the next great wave—AI Native—is already on the horizon. Successfully navigating these continuous shifts is the defining challenge for modern technology leaders. How do you move from abstract strategic ideas to a concrete, co-created plan that your entire team can get behind?

This hands-on workshop provides the tools and a structured process to do just that. At the heart of this session is a unique and powerful "pattern language"—a physical deck of Paradigm, Antipattern, and Transformation cards. These tangible tools provide a shared vocabulary to diagnose your current state with unflinching honesty and design a future that is both ambitious and achievable.

Join us to turn complex strategic conversations into a dynamic, engaging, and visual planning session. You will leave not with a document that sits on a shelf, but with a collaboratively built roadmap and a clear, unified vision for your transformation journey.

How it Works
We will guide your team through a structured, 3-hour collaborative process:

1. Diagnose Your Digital DNA (Current State Analysis) We begin by defining your "North Star"—the single most important objective for your transformation. Using Paradigm Cards, we will visually map your organization's maturity across the three great waves of innovation: Legacy (Waterfall), Cloud Native, and AI Native. Crucially, we will also use Antipattern Cards to expose the hidden traps and cultural pitfalls currently slowing you down.

2. The Strategic Pause Before planning the future, we introduce three powerful mental models: The Product Lifecycle, The Waves of Innovation, and The Six Modes of Operation. This brief "teaching moment" ensures everyone in the room has the strategic context needed to build a robust plan.

3. Build Your Actionable Roadmap This is where strategy becomes action. Using Transformation Pattern Cards, you will co-design a multi-wave roadmap. You will sequence the key moves needed to mature your current practices, responsibly "strangle" legacy systems, and prepare for the AI-native future. Finally, we pressure-test this plan against your identified antipatterns to ensure it solves your most critical problems.

Who Should Attend?
This workshop is designed for technology leaders, architects, product managers, and cross-functional teams who are:

• Kicking off a new transformation initiative.
• Feeling "stuck" in their current Cloud Native or digital transformation.
• Seeking to align leadership and delivery teams on a shared strategic vision.
• Looking for a structured, repeatable process to build actionable technology roadmaps.

What You Will Achieve
By the end of this interactive session, your team will have:

• A Shared Language: A common vocabulary of patterns to make strategic conversations more effective and inclusive.
• A Clear Diagnosis: A visual, honest snapshot of your organization's current state, including your maturity across the waves of innovation (e.g., Waterfall, Cloud Native, AI Native) and the hidden antipatterns holding you back.

An Actionable Roadmap: A collaboratively built, multi-wave transformation plan with clear, prioritized next steps to implement immediately.

Scaling AI in Production: AIOps, Architecture, and Human Oversight

Tue, Apr 7 · 6:00 PM CEST

Miro, Fred. Roeskestraat 100, 1076 EE, Amsterdam, NL

We are thrilled to welcome you to our 9th edition of AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the Miro headquarters in Amsterdam.

We look forward to seeing you again for another evening with the AI Native community. This edition brings together operational AI, architecture leadership, and real world system design.

We'll be having another open panel discussion featuring all speakers, so come prepared with your questions.

If there are specific topics or formats you would like to see in future meetups, feel free to reach out. This community is shaped by the engineers in the room.

A massive thank you to our host, Miro, for providing the venue, food, and drinks for this evening and for supporting the Dutch AI engineering community.

We’ll cover:

• Designing AI-powered AIOps Command Centers for predictive intelligence and self-healing infrastructure
• Replacing reactive maintenance with unified observability and automated diagnostics in B2B SaaS core banking
• Preserving architectural intent while AI agents accelerate software delivery
• Aligning AI initiatives with governance frameworks and AI Native infrastructure principles
• Extracting deeper technical insights during the end-of-evening panel discussion

Speaker 1: Shekhar Kachole
Shekhar Kachole is a results-oriented visionary Chief Technology Officer with over 30 years of experience in the technology industry.

Known for consistently breaking new ground, he produces value by enhancing existing capabilities and delivering innovative solutions that yield lasting engineering and financial benefits for organizations.
As a dynamic and strategic leader and a certified Chief AI Officer, Shekhar has a proven track record of proactively addressing customer needs and expectations, both internally and externally.

Thriving in demanding, multi-task environments, he excels in providing cost-effective project designs and leading large-scale digital transformations using AI & Big Data across various geographies.
Shekhar is a motivational leader skilled in identifying critical team members to build strong project teams. An articulate communicator, he effectively engages with diverse groups at all corporate levels and is an organized planner with excellent time management skills.

Key areas of focus:

• Driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage by tying AI initiatives are integrated into the company’s strategic plan.
• Leading the end-to-end execution of scalable AI solutions that demonstrably optimize operations and unlock data-driven revenue streams.
• Establishing robust governance frameworks that ensure ethical AI practices and data privacy to build trust with customers, regulators, and stakeholders.
• Cultivating a world-class AI/ML talent engine and fostering a culture of continuous innovation

Talk: AI-Powered Operational Intelligence in B2B Saas Core Banking Platform
Operational excellence has become the defining battleground in B2B SaaS core banking. As financial institutions demand near-zero downtime and rapid innovation cycles, legacy monolithic architectures are increasingly strained. Engineering capacity is often consumed by reactive maintenance, production incidents, and fragile deployment pipelines — creating significant operational drag.
This talk explores the shift toward an AI-first operating model. By introducing predictive intelligence, unified observability, automated diagnostics, and self-healing infrastructure, organizations can reduce accumulated technical debt and reposition their platforms for scale, reliability, and faster feature delivery.
The session outlines how an AI-powered AIOps Command Center can transform operational constraints into strategic advantage, establishing a foundation for more autonomous and resilient systems.

Speaker 2: Kenny Schwegler
Kenny (Baas) Schwegler believes in collaborative software design where “every voice shapes the software.” Leveraging a domain-driven design approach and Team Topologies, he facilitates clearer communication between stakeholders and software creators through collaborative modelling and deep democracy. His work focuses on decoding complexity, resolving conflict, and ensuring software remains adaptable to evolving business demands.
As Lead Software Architect for DHL BeNeLux, independent consultant, and trainer, he specializes in technical leadership, software architecture, and sociotechnical system design. He works with organizations and teams to design and build sustainable and resilient software architectures.

Talk: Facilitating Software Architecture While AI Agents Write the Code
AI agents are accelerating software delivery. Code ships faster than ever before. The open question is whether architecture improves at the same pace.
Developers have always made implicit architectural decisions. What has changed is the speed at which those decisions are made — and increasingly, delegated. When AI systems generate code based on incomplete context, assumptions are embedded into design choices as if they were intentional. These assumptions compound over time, often without visibility.
This session explores how implicit architectural drift emerges in AI-assisted development, how cognitive biases amplify the problem, and how teams can retain architectural clarity and deliberate design while leveraging AI acceleration.
The focus is on keeping architecture intentional, explicit, and human-led in an AI-accelerated engineering environment.

Speaker 3: To Be Announced.
We are currently finalizing our second speaker, an expert who will bring a unique perspective to the AI Native landscape. Stay tuned for the announcement!

Agenda:
18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
18:30 — Talk #1 | Shekhar Kachole
19:10 — Talk #2 | Kenny Schwegler
19:50 — Talk #3 | TBD
20:30 — Interactive Panel: Open conversation & audience Q&A
20:45 — Networking & more drinks
21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. We’ll be exploring AIOps, AI Agents, and AI/ML governance, and we’d love to hear your questions during the Interactive Panel.

Who is this for: Platform engineers, AI/ML engineers, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and validating reliable AI systems in production.

Where to find us: Miro, Cozy Cafe, Fred. Roeskestraat 100, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands

From Prompts to Pre-Training: Quality, Scale, and the Road to AI Native

Thu, May 7 · 5:45 PM CEST

Adyen, Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6-50, Amsterdam, NL

We are thrilled to welcome you to our 10th edition of the AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the Adyen headquarters in Amsterdam!

This is a joint meetup between Adyen Developer Events and Meetups and AI Native Netherlands meetup.

At the end of the evening, we're adding another Q&A panel. After the talks, you can submit questions online about what was just presented. The speakers will answer them live.

A massive thank you to our host, Adyen, for their generosity in providing the venue, food, and drinks for this evening and for supporting the Dutch AI engineering community.

We’ll cover:

• Multi-layer evaluators and human-in-the-loop safeguards for production LLM systems
• Failure modes and silent quality degradation in agentic pipelines
• Quality engineering and monitoring for production LLM systems
• Building and deploying foundational models at trillion-token scale
• Training infrastructure, pre-training at trillion-token scale, and meeting strict production SLAs
• A structured panel discussion where your questions about the talks drive the technical deep dive

Speaker 1: Ronny Roeller (NEXT AI)
Ronny is CTO and Co-Founder of NEXT AI — a customer insights platform for the AI era. Launched in April 2023, clients include Deel, Bosch, Generali, Rituals, Action, and others. He studied Computer Science at VU Amsterdam and works on building scalable, production-ready AI systems.

Talk: From Prompts to Production: Engineering Quality in LLM-Based Systems
Building systems around large language models is fundamentally different from traditional software. Outputs are probabilistic, data-dependent, and costly to compute. Deterministic QA approaches quickly break down.

In this talk, Ronny will share how production-grade quality was engineered for LLM workflows using multi-layer evaluators, real customer datasets, and human-in-the-loop safeguards. He will walk through concrete failure modes encountered in production, how silent quality degradation emerged over time, and the architectural patterns that restored reliability.

The focus is on practical techniques to measure, monitor, and continuously improve LLM system quality beyond prompt tuning.

Speaker 2: Hanna van der Vlis (Adyen)
Hanna van der Vlis is an AI research engineer at Adyen, a payment processor that handles over 40B transactions annually. She focuses on deep learning research, training infrastructure, and building foundational models. She is passionate about solving large-scale engineering challenges, deploying AI to optimize complex systems and driving real-world impact.

Talk: Towards The Adyen Foundational Model
Traditional machine learning in the payments industry relies heavily on point-in-time information silos and Boosted Trees. This approach is increasingly constrained by manual feature engineering and limited label availability.

In this talk, Hanna will outline Adyen’s transition toward a unified Foundational Model by rethinking payment sequences as a language problem. She will walk through the engineering challenges of pre-training a shared backbone on up to 51.2 trillion tokens, overcoming compute bottlenecks, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks such as fraud detection and authentication.

The focus is on the practical realities of developing and deploying these large-scale models while meeting strict sub-30ms SLAs in production.

Agenda:
17:45 — Arrival, food & drinks
18:30 — Talk #1 | Ronny Roeller
19:15 — Talk #2 | Hanna van der Vlis
20:00 — Panel discussion: Open conversation & audience Q&A
20:30 — Networking & more drinks
20:45 — Wrapping up

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. If you are working on LLM workflows, foundational models, training infrastructure, or sub-30ms production SLAs, we would love to hear your technical questions during the panel discussion.

Who is this for: Platform engineers, AI/ML engineers, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and validating reliable AI systems in production.

Where to find us: Adyen, Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6-50, Amsterdam
(meet at the reception; you will be brought to the 11th floor of the office building where the event will take place).