AI agency Utrecht: automation for companies in the region

The kind of companies based in Utrecht — and the work that piles up

Utrecht is largely a city of offices. Professional services, IT companies, accountancy and advisory firms, and a notable concentration of healthcare organisations and sector bodies. Many of them have international clients or English-speaking teams, so the working language on the shop floor is not always Dutch. That is fine — we work in either.

A company whose product is other people’s hours has a specific kind of leftover work. Not the big processes, which usually sit in a decent package, but the shuffling around them. The steps nobody ever wrote down because they simply come with the job.

• Sorting incoming documents. At an accountancy or advisory firm, files arrive per client by email, portal and post. Someone recognises them, renames them and files them. Same work every week, and a good first candidate for automation.
• Connecting time entries to matters and invoices. In most firms, time tracking, the client file and billing live in three places. A day a month goes into lining them up, and something always stays unbilled.
• Intake and referrals at healthcare organisations. A request comes in, gets retyped into the internal system, and the confirmation goes out by hand. Exactly the kind of work where errors creep in on a busy day.
• Quotes and reporting at IT companies. You build software for other people while your own back office runs on copy and paste. It happens more often than you would expect.

The ring around the city: Nieuwegein, Houten and Woerden

Outside the city there is a different economy: business parks with wholesalers, installation and technical services companies, and suppliers. Nieuwegein, Houten and Woerden are the best-known examples, and for us they are the same trip.

There the leftover work looks different. Fewer documents, more orders and delivery notes:

• Customer orders that arrive as an email or a PDF and are keyed into the system by hand. At a wholesaler that is often half a job.
• Supplier delivery notes and order confirmations that do not match the purchase order automatically, so someone compares them line by line.
• Engineers’ job sheets that still have to go into the system on Friday afternoon, usually incomplete, usually delaying the invoice.
• Stock and price lists from suppliers, each in its own format, each loaded in by hand.

Healthcare, advisory and IT: what comes with the territory here

In this city you deal with sensitive data more often than average. Client records at a healthcare organisation, case files at an advisory firm, customer data at an IT company that is itself accountable to its own clients.

That does not make automation impossible, but it does set the order of work. We check in advance which data would pass through an AI model, whether that is necessary, and whether it can be avoided. Often it can: a large share of the work that piles up is sorting, matching and moving, and none of that requires reading the contents.

One more thing: we do not sell chatbots. A chat window on your website does not touch the problem described on this page. If that is what you want, we are not the right party and we will say so in the first call.

We have no office in Utrecht — how it works instead

To be clear: there is no Ubert office in Utrecht. Our address is Torenlaan 5B, 1402 AT Bussum. We are not going to pretend we are around the corner. That misleads you, and Google penalises it anyway.

In practice you barely notice. Utrecht is about half an hour from Bussum outside rush hour, via the A27 or the A2. During the morning and evening peak it is considerably longer around Utrecht, so we prefer to schedule site visits between ten and four. By train it is a straightforward trip from Naarden-Bussum with one change.

What that costs: travel is charged per kilometre from Bussum at €0.45 per kilometre. Utrecht is roughly thirty kilometres one way, so a return visit works out at around €27. Nieuwegein, Houten and Woerden are a few euros more. It sits on the invoice separately from the hourly rate, so you can check it.

Not being based in the city has one advantage: coming over is not an exception for us. At this distance a half-day on your shop floor is simply something we schedule, and that is exactly what a good AI project needs.

What it costs

Our rates are the same everywhere, in Utrecht as much as in Bussum. They are here so you do not have to ask for them.

• AI scan: free, about five minutes online. You get a score, a few concrete opportunities and a first price indication.
• Core session on your shop floor: a half-day of 4 hours, €596 excluding VAT and travel costs. A full day is €1,192. Our advisory hourly rate is €149.
• Building: €110 per hour for straightforward work, €165 per hour for complex development. Paid monthly in advance from a budget you set, so there is no open end.
• Travel costs: €0.45 per kilometre from Bussum, invoiced separately.

Where it goes wrong

The honest part, because you rarely hear it in a sales meeting. At the kind of companies in and around Utrecht, four things come back again and again.

• Nobody owns it. At an office organisation with four or five managers, everyone finds it interesting and nobody is accountable. The project does not die in an argument, it disappears behind the calendar. This is the most common cause by far.
• The data does not add up. Clients entered twice, file numbers built differently per department, addresses in a free text field. Cleaning that up is dull manual work up front, and it is often the bulk of the first few weeks.
• The software vendor keeps the door shut. Many professional services and healthcare organisations run a sector-specific package with a closed or expensive interface. That is a real risk. We check it before anything gets built; sometimes the answer is that a different process should go first.
• Starting too big. The temptation is to begin with billing or time tracking, because that is where the hours are. But if something breaks there, you pay for it in trust. Start with something where a mistake is visible and repairable.

How to start

Start with the free AI scan online. Five minutes, no sales pitch. You get a score, a handful of opportunities that fit your type of company, and a price indication. That tells you whether a conversation is worth having.

If the answer is yes, we schedule the core session at your place in Utrecht or the region: a half-day of 4 hours on your own shop floor. We follow one or two processes end to end, talk to the people doing the work, and count the steps.

After that you get a core report with priorities and a go or no-go per opportunity. That report is yours, even if you never work with us again. What you do next — build with us, continue with your own IT partner, or nothing for now — is up to you.

1. 01Free AI scan online, five minutes.
2. 02A half-hour intro call, by phone or online.
3. 03A half-day core session at your site, €596 excluding VAT and travel costs.
4. 04Core report with a go or no-go per opportunity.
5. 05Only then building, paid monthly in advance from a budget you set.

Frequently asked questions

What we do here

Further reading

Other regions

Shall we come over to Utrecht?

Start with the free five-minute AI scan, or book a half-hour intro call straight away. If you are in Utrecht, Nieuwegein, Houten or Woerden, we drive over from Bussum for the core session on your own shop floor.