About
Tim van Kasteren
Fractional Director of AI. Fifteen years of building AI systems and, more recently, of leading the change that lets companies use them. Based in Amsterdam.
What I do
I work as a Director of AI for companies that do not have one, or that need one for the length of a transition. I steer the AI projects, coach the people running them, and keep the change moving across the organisation. I work fractionally, which is enough to do all three without the company taking on another full-time executive.
The work falls into two shapes: making the whole company AI-mature, and building AI-powered products with your product and tech teams. Next to that, I take on bounded builds myself when a company already has a concrete problem to solve or a solution in mind.
Where I have done it
Fifteen years of building AI systems across retail and e-commerce, two-sided marketplaces, smart cities, command and control systems, and the maritime sector. In the last years that has meant leading AI transformations: a company-wide rollout of Claude to hundreds of employees with training and skills labs, a data modernisation track that built a data platform and let product and tech ship AI products, and bringing agents and coding assistants into developer workflows at team level.
The companies I have worked with will be listed here once I have their agreement.
Research
I am a published researcher. The paper most relevant to this work is Versioning for end-to-end machine learning pipelines, presented at NeurIPS 2017 and written with colleagues at Schibsted Media Group, about running many versions of a production pipeline at once without recomputing everything. The rest is on Google Scholar.
I also write here about data platforms, MLOps and what AI models can and cannot do.
Start with a conversation
Tell me where your company is with AI. I will tell you what I would do first.