A Friday in Groningen with TopX

TopX is an ICT consultancy on the Zernike campus in Groningen. It places developers, testers and application managers with employers across Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe and Overijssel, and it keeps a standing network of technical people around that work. On Friday 28 February 2020, DKAI Lab brought its AI transformation talk to that network. The audience was an IT services firm and its people, being asked to treat AI as a company-level programme with a maturity model, a skills plan and a project portfolio behind it.

Two files survive from the day, and neither was made for it. Both were exported to PDF on 11 March 2020, three minutes apart. The first is a 30-slide corporate keynote whose filename still reads Greece-Keynotepptx, which places its origin at the Greece keynote of March 2019. The second runs to 70 slides: the same 30, followed by a 40-slide set whose title card was never changed and still reads LinkedIn Live, 31 January 2020, Assen, with thanks to Ultraware BV. Nothing inside either file names TopX, Groningen or February.

The argument the slides carry is a plain one. Three pillars: an honest assessment of AI maturity, a trained workforce, and projects picked for return rather than novelty. Around that sits an operating model of nine parts, from governance and org structure through data flow to sourcing, and a five-plateau learning path that runs from maths and statistics up to applied AI. The client stories are specific. A global telco: a blended training programme, a skills matrix built on a few hundred data points, and business plans the deck values at 2.5 billion euros across more than twenty AI solutions, over eight months. A breast cancer cytology classifier: four months, a small dataset, roughly 82 per cent accuracy on malignant versus benign. Two research projects also appear, curae.ai on apical lesions in dental images using Faster R-CNN, U-Net and Mask R-CNN, and caeli on multi-image super resolution from satellite data.

There are no photographs. No attendance list, no agenda, no recording, no notes from the room. The folder holds two PDFs and a name, and that is the whole record. Two things should be said plainly: the date rests on the folder name alone, and the decks were travelling material that had already served two other audiences and would serve a third in Iran that May.

Two weeks after this session the Netherlands closed its public spaces. The archive does not record what the room in Groningen looked like, or whether there was a room at all.