Talks & podcasts

Talk · Data Expo 2026 · September 9, 2026 · 15:45 · Jaarbeurs Utrecht

Content as a Service at bol: how all bollers can create on-brand content at scale with AI

With Benjamin van Vianen | Manager Scalable Content & Tooling, bol · Joey Man | AI Growth Designer, bol

How bol turned experimental AI projects into a scalable content creation platform. Organizations are challenged to create more on-brand content, for more audiences, across more channels than ever before, all under real budget constraints. This talk covers practical implementations spanning text, imagery, and full webpage generation, with a focus on marketing and advertising applications, and shares how thinking big while starting small helped bol move from one-off experiments to a repeatable system.

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Talk · Data Expo 2026 · September 10, 2026 · 14:15 · Jaarbeurs Utrecht

From data platform to AI platform: how Winparts prevents returns with data & AI

With Harm Albers | Data Science Lead, Winparts · Rense van der Zee | Data Engineer, Winparts

How Winparts built a scalable open-source data platform with DLT, DBT, and cloud-native orchestration, then extended it into AI territory through 'AI jobs': lightweight, containerized processes that read from the warehouse, run an LLM task, and write the results back. The first AI job analyzes returns to spot patterns and improve product data. The talk shares practical lessons on building an AI-ready data foundation, staying cloud-agnostic, and scaling from one use case to many while navigating open-source trade-offs.

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Talk · Data Expo 2026 · September 10, 2026 · 16:00 · Jaarbeurs Utrecht

When your data warehouse talks back: how conversational analytics changes the analytics game

How conversational AI agents can let people query a data warehouse in plain language instead of waiting on a data team. Using a simulated e-commerce scenario, this talk shows how a question that used to mean a support ticket and a day's wait can return an answer in seconds, freeing the data team to focus on harder analytical problems. It also covers what this shift means for both business and technical roles, with perspectives relevant to organizations of different sizes.

Original page See the conversational analytics tool

Talk · ContentCon Europe 2026 · September 30 – October 1, 2026 · Circa, Amsterdam

Speaking at ContentCon Europe

Mark is a featured speaker at ContentCon Europe 2026, alongside bol colleagues Benjamin van Vianen and Joey Man. The event's full agenda and session abstracts aren't public yet — this entry will be updated with the talk title and description once they are.

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Podcast · AI Today Live · August 30, 2026 · Season 8, Episode 83 · 48 min

Bezorgprobleem bij bol opgelost zonder AI: waarom de simpelste oplossing vaak wint

Hosted by Joop Snijder & Niels Naglé

A conversation about why the simplest working solution usually beats the complex one. Mark discusses solving a delivery-notification problem at bol by tracing it to an expired timestamp and adjusting FAQ messaging, instead of reaching for an elaborate AI system. The episode covers timeboxing projects into 3-month validation cycles, building lightweight data infrastructure for under €100/month versus €10.000–15.000/year enterprise platforms, why the data foundation (security, access, standardization) has to come before analysis, and why smaller organizations don't always need a full-time data engineer once that foundation is in place.

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