AI agency Almere: automating processes at fast-growing companies

Which companies sit in Almere — and what gets left undone

Most of the business activity sits on the business parks: construction and installation, transport and logistics, wholesale and technical services, on estates such as De Vaart, Markerkant, Gooisekant and Sallandsekant. Alongside that is a broad layer of smaller service firms. For the first group the issue is volume, for the second it is concentration. It looks like this:

• Engineers’ job sheets keyed into the system by hand on Friday afternoon.
• Delivery notes and order confirmations arriving as email or PDF, then retyped.
• A schedule in a spreadsheet beside the package holding the hours, so nobody knows which is right.
• Quotes assembled from old documents, with last year’s prices still in them.
• One general mailbox where everything lands, sorted by hand daily.

Why processes drift at a fast-growing company

Almere is a young city and you can see that in its companies. Many went from a handful of people to a few dozen in a short space of time, and the way of working grew with them. Another colleague arrived, so another list appeared; a second van, so a second folder. Nobody ever said: if we started again today, we would not set it up this way.

That is not sloppiness, it is the price of growth. But the admin then grows in step with revenue instead of with the technology. For us that is good news: such a process is usually logical, just tied together by hand in ten places, and those knots are the opportunities. Less good: rapid growth almost always leaves the data messy.

What we tackle first

We start with one process that comes back every week and where a mistake is visible and repairable. Not with invoicing or the time registration your payroll hangs on. Four things come up most often:

• Reading and filing incoming documents automatically: delivery notes, order confirmations, invoices. A person only checks the exceptions.
• Making two systems talk that do not do so on their own: scheduling and accounting, webshop and stock, hours and invoicing.
• Sorting and routing incoming mail, with a draft reply for the questions that recur weekly.
• Building quotes and calculations from earlier work, using current prices.

Coming over from Bussum: how that works in practice

Our office is at Torenlaan 5B in Bussum. In Almere we have no office, and we do not rent an address there to look better in Google. If you work with us, someone drives over from Bussum.

It is close: the A1 towards Muiderberg, then the A6 across the Hollandse Brug, roughly 25 minutes outside rush hour. In the peak that stretch is a known bottleneck, so we schedule sessions between nine and four. Mind the distances inside the city too: Almere Poort sits right behind the bridge, De Vaart and Almere Buiten a fair way further.

Travel costs are €0.45 per kilometre from Bussum. For a half-day that usually comes to between €15 and €25 for the return trip, depending on the district. It is separate from the session fee and it is on the confirmation in advance. What we do not do is judge a process remotely that we have never seen.

What it costs

Our rates are the same everywhere. What varies is the number of hours, which is why we do not quote a fixed project price before we have watched the work.

• AI scan: free, five minutes online. You get a score, opportunities and a first price indication.
• Core session on your shop floor: a half-day (4 hours), €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. A full day is €1,192; our advisory rate is €149 per hour.
• Building: €110 per hour for straightforward work, €165 per hour for complex development, paid monthly in advance from a budget you set.
• Travel costs: €0.45 per kilometre from Bussum.
• Running costs once something is live: what the AI models and connected services cost per month. Those scale with your volume; we work them out beforehand.

Where it goes wrong

At companies that have grown quickly, the same four things go wrong. None has anything to do with AI.

• No owner inside the company. Everyone finds it interesting, nobody is accountable, and it disappears behind the daily rush.
• The key person has no time. Whoever knows how it really runs is usually also keeping the day going.
• Data that does not add up. Duplicate customers and part numbers appear on their own during growth; cleaning up often fills the first weeks.
• A vendor keeping the integration closed: no open API, or only on a more expensive plan. We check that before we build.

Working in English

Plenty of teams in Almere work in English: foreign-owned companies, international workforces, or simply English on the floor. We can run all of it in English: the intro call, the core session, the report and the documentation.

One honest caveat. Your own systems are often Dutch — accounting packages, ERP screens, supplier portals — and opening up an integration sometimes means a call in Dutch to a support desk that offers nothing else. We handle that. But if the output has to end up in Dutch for your customers or your accountant, say so at the start: it changes what we build, not whether we can.

How to start

Start with the free AI scan. Five minutes online, no sales call. It tells you whether a conversation is worth having.

If it is, we plan a core session at your site in Almere: a half-day (4 hours), €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. We follow one or two processes end to end, talk to the people doing the work and count the steps. Afterwards you get a report with priorities and a go or no-go per opportunity.

That report is yours; use it internally or with another party. If you build with us, the same people who ran the session do the work. We carry professional and general liability insurance, and a subsidy partner checks whether a scheme applies.

Frequently asked questions

What we do here

Further reading

Other regions

Start with the free AI scan

Five minutes online, no sales call: a score, concrete opportunities and a price indication. Would you rather talk first, book an intro call. We will tell you whether a core session at your site in Almere is worth doing — and if not, we will say so.