Data Booster
3 minutes
Organisations are investing heavily in AI technology, yet the promised step-change keeps failing to materialise. The cause is rarely the technology, and almost always thepeople who have to work with it. It is with that conviction that
Nanne Veldman joins Data Booster, the Dutch data & AI capability building company, as co-founder and CEO, effective 1 July 2026. He leads the companyalongside founder Wouter Neef.
“Technology is rarely the hard part of a transformation; people are,” says Nanne Veldman. “I keep being surprised that organisations make large investments in technology, but do not free up the resources to bring their people along into this new reality, and are then surprised the expected step-change does not come. Data Booster combines the technical and the human lens, and that is exactly why I am excited to take this to the next level together with Wouter.”
Most organisations now have access to the same AI tools. What sets them apart is whether their people apply those tools in daily work to create value. Data Booster co-designs every programme with the organisation, builds cohorts around their own use cases, data and tools, gives employees hands-on experimentation, and makes progress measurable through benchmarked Skill Growth Assessments.
The pattern is stubborn. Data Booster recently spoke with an organisation that had spent its entire budget on ChatGPT licences and then had nothing left to help employees actually put them to work: precisely the gap Data Booster sets out to close.
Veldman's appointment formalises a partnership that began in November 2025, when he joined as a strategic advisor. It also marks a broader ambition: scaling Data Booster from a data & AI upskilling platform into a full partner for the people side of data & AI transformations, building not only skills, but the lasting capability and culture organisations need to succeed with AI.
“Nanne and I bring two different journeys to the same mission; his in leading people and transformations at Shell and UltiMaker, mine in data, AI and digital at ING and Uber,” says Wouter Neef, founder of Data Booster. “Our joint leadership lets Data Booster build further: helping organisations develop the capability and the culture to succeed with data and AI for the long term.”
Veldman brings more than fifteen years of experience in HR, organisational development & learning and commercial leadership. He spent a decade at Shell across HR and organisational development roles, served as Chief People Officer at UltiMaker through a merger and post-merger integration, and most recently as VP EMEA, leading the company's commercial organisation across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The expanded proposition builds on proven results. Data Booster has delivered programmes to more than 10,000 professionals worldwide, with partners including SHV Energy, PostNL, Allianz Partners, Just Eat Takeaway, PGGM, Jaarbeurs and Skyscanner.
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