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For our first meetup of 2026, we're bringing you two deeply technical stories from the front lines of applied AI, together with AI Native Netherlands. We'll hear how the ANWB navigates the challenges of imperfect data in a legacy organization, and then dive into a practical guide for building production-grade AI agentic workflows with Elastic.

We’ll cover:

• ANWB's journey from manual operations to real-world AI predictions.
• Balancing the human and technical challenges of AI innovation.
• A practical guide to building production-grade agentic workflows.
• Integrating LLMs, vector search, and security into a simplified stack.

Speakers 1: Yke Rusticus & David Brummer (ANWB) Yke is a data engineer at ANWB with a background in astronomy and artificial intelligence. In the industry, he learned that AI models and algorithms often do not get past the experimentation phase, leading him to specialise in MLOps to bridge the gap between experimentation and production. As a professional in this field, Yke has developed ML platforms and use cases across different cloud providers, and is passionate about sharing his knowledge through tutorials and trainings.

David is a self-acclaimed “not your typical Data Scientist” who loves analogue photography, vegan food, dogs, and holds an unofficial PhD in thrifting and sourcing second-hand pearls. With a background in growth hacking and experience in the digital marketing trenches of a startup, a scale-up, and a digital agency, he now brings together lean startup thinking, marketing know-how, and sales pitches, blending it all with a passion for creativity and tech at the ANWB. As a bridge between business and data, David focuses on building AI solutions that don’t just work, but actually get used.

Talk: How AI is helping you back on the road We learn at school what AI can do when the data is perfect. We learn at conferences what AI can do when the environment is perfect. In this talk, you'll learn what AI can do when neither is perfect. This story is about the process of overcoming these challenges in an organisation that has been around since the invention of the bike. We'll balance the technical aspect of these solutions with the human aspect throughout the talk. Because in the end, it's not actually AI helping you back on the road, it's people.

Speaker 2: Hans Heerooms (Elastic) Hans Heerooms is a Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic. He has worked in various roles, but always with one objective: helping organisations to get the most out of their data with the least amount of effort. His current role at Elastic is all about supporting Elastic’s customers to help them evolve from data driven decisions to AI guided workflows.

Talk: Building Production-Grade AI Agentic Workflows with Elastic This talk tells and shows how Elastic Agent Builder can help to build and implement agentic workflows. It addresses the complexity of traditional development by integrating all necessary components—LLM orchestration, vector database, tracing, and security—directly into the Elasticsearch Search AI Platform. This talk will show you how to build custom agents, declare and assign tools, and start conversations with your data.

Agenda: 17:45 — Arrival, food & drinks 18:30 — Talk #1 \| Yke & David (ANWB) 19:15 — Short break 19:30 — Talk #2 \| Hans Heerooms (Elastic) 20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks 21:00 — Wrapping up

Please note that the main door will close at 18.00. You will still be able to enter our office, but we might ask you to wait a little bit while we come down to open the door for you.

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. If you're working on MLOps, applied AI, or building agentic workflows, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Who this is for: Data scientists, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, MLOps specialists, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and using real-world AI solutions.

Where to find us: Elastic's office in Amsterdam Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam

Hi everyone, Many of you asked for more practical, real-world AI use-cases, and we listened!

For our first meetup of 2026, we're bringing you two deeply technical stories from the front lines of applied AI. We'll hear how the ANWB navigates the challenges of imperfect data in a legacy organization, and then dive into a practical guide for building production-grade AI agentic workflows with Elastic.

A huge thank you to our friends at Elastic for hosting us at their Amsterdam office. Food and drinks will be provided!

We’ll cover:

• ANWB's journey from manual operations to real-world AI predictions.
• Balancing the human and technical challenges of AI innovation.
• A practical guide to building production-grade agentic workflows.
• Integrating LLMs, vector search, and security into a simplified stack.

Speakers 1: Yke Rusticus & David Brummer (ANWB) Yke is a data engineer at ANWB with a background in astronomy and artificial intelligence. In the industry, he learned that AI models and algorithms often do not get past the experimentation phase, leading him to specialise in MLOps to bridge the gap between experimentation and production. As a professional in this field, Yke has developed ML platforms and use cases across different cloud providers, and is passionate about sharing his knowledge through tutorials and trainings.

David is a self-acclaimed “not your typical Data Scientist” who loves analogue photography, vegan food, dogs, and holds an unofficial PhD in thrifting and sourcing second-hand pearls. With a background in growth hacking and experience in the digital marketing trenches of a startup, a scale-up, and a digital agency, he now brings together lean startup thinking, marketing know-how, and sales pitches, blending it all with a passion for creativity and tech at the ANWB. As a bridge between business and data, David focuses on building AI solutions that don’t just work, but actually get used.

Talk: How AI is helping you back on the road We learn at school what AI can do when the data is perfect. We learn at conferences what AI can do when the environment is perfect. In this talk, you'll learn what AI can do when neither is perfect. This story is about the process of overcoming these challenges in an organisation that has been around since the invention of the bike. We'll balance the technical aspect of these solutions with the human aspect throughout the talk. Because in the end, it's not actually AI helping you back on the road, it's people.

Speaker 2: Hans Heerooms (Elastic) Hans Heerooms is a Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic. He has worked in various roles, but always with one objective: helping organisations to get the most out of their data with the least amount of effort. His current role at Elastic is all about supporting Elastic’s customers to help them evolve from data driven decisions to AI guided workflows.

Talk: Building Production-Grade AI Agentic Workflows with Elastic This talk tells and shows how Elastic Agent Builder can help to build and implement agentic workflows. It addresses the complexity of traditional development by integrating all necessary components—LLM orchestration, vector database, tracing, and security—directly into the Elasticsearch Search AI Platform. This talk will show you how to build custom agents, declare and assign tools, and start conversations with your data.

Agenda: 17:45 — Arrival, food & drinks 18:30 — Talk #1 \| Yke & David (ANWB) 19:15 — Short break 19:30 — Talk #2 \| Hans Heerooms (Elastic) 20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks 21:00 — Wrapping up

Please note that the main door will close at 18.00. You will still be able to enter our office, but we might ask you to wait a little bit while we come down to open the door for you.

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. If you're working on MLOps, applied AI, or building agentic workflows, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Who this is for: Data scientists, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, MLOps specialists, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and using real-world AI solutions.

Where to find us: Elastic Amsterdam Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam

We are very happy to announce that we are organizing the 12th edition of the Eindhoven Data Community meetup. This time we will be back at one of our favourite locations, the Skybar in Microlab!

This meetup will be all about on how to make impact using Machine Learning. First, Maria Vechtomova, MLOps Tech Lead at Ahold Delhaize, will talk about how to standardize the processes around ML model deployment in order to significantly reduce time to production. Second, Yke Rusticus, ML engineer at Xebia Data, will tell more about how Vattenfall leverages data and AI to help customers get a grip on their energy consumption and help them become more sustainable one step at a time.

Leveraging data and AI to help customers become more sustainable one step at a time. Vattenfall's mission is to enable fossil free living in one generation. With gas prices rising and the effect of global warming becoming more apparent, more people are realising that we must act now. But where do you start? In this session, we will share how Vattenfall leverages data and AI to help customers get a grip on their energy consumption and help them become more sustainable one step at a time.

MLOps as a product 10 years ago, the first corporate companies started investing in data science. By now, most have multiple machine learning models running in production, but productionalizing new models takes longer than companies would like it to. The goal of MLOps is to standardize the processes around machine learning model deployment and significantly reduce time to production. In large organizations, this quickly pays off. Maria Vechtomova believes that MLOps should be viewed as a product, and therefore managed as a product. In her talk, she will walk through the components of an MLOps platform (such as MLOps infrastructure, reusable deployment pipelines and governance) and the composition of the ideal MLOps product team.

Program

• 17:00 – 18:00 🍕 Food
• 18:00 – 18:10 🎤 Welcome
• 18:10 – 19:00 🎤 Yke Rusticus - Leveraging data and AI to help customers become more sustainable one step at a time.
• 19:00 – 19:15 ⏸️ Break
• 19:15 – 20:00 🎤 Maria Vechtomova - MLOps as a product
• 20:00-21:00 🥤 Drinks

Speaker 1: Yke Rusticus Yke is a Machine Learning Engineer at Xebia Data with a background in astronomy and artificial intelligence. In the industry, he learned that models and algorithms often do not get past the experimentation phase, leading him to specialise in MLOps to bridge the gap between experimentation and production. As a professional in this field, Yke has developed ML platforms and use cases across different cloud providers, and is passionate about sharing his knowledge through tutorials and trainings.

Speaker 2: Maria Vechtomova Maria is a Lead ML Engineer at Ahold Delhaize, bridging the gap between data scientists infra and IT teams at different brands and focusing on standardization of ML model deployments across all the brands of Ahold Delhaize. Maria believes that a model only starts living when it is in production. For this reason, last seven years, she focused on MLOps. Together with Basak and Raphael, running Marvelous MLOps. For more info, follow Marvelous MLOps on Substack: https://marvelousmlops.substack.com