About Nikolaj
CTO specialising in AI-first product organisations. 15+ years building and scaling AI-powered products in healthcare, insurance, and industrial B2B, from solo-founded SaaS to enterprise platforms processing 2M+ claims annually at AXA. MSc in AI/ML (Summa Cum Laude, Amsterdam). Three languages, three continents. Equally comfortable hiring a founding engineer and presenting to a board.
- Product delivery: Track record spanning solo-founded SaaS products to enterprise-scale AI platforms. Hands-on ML background (Siemens Research, clinical AI with validated patient outcomes at AP-HP) combined with experience industrialising agentic systems in regulated, high-stakes environments.
- Team building: Recruited and scaled engineering organizations from founding engineer to 30+ FTE in startup contexts, and directed cross-border teams in enterprise. Brings the delivery structure that enables scaling without sacrificing speed. Currently building an AI-first product organisation at AXA, delivering unprecedented productivity gains.
- Commercial engagement: Direct experience in (pre)sales (€100M+), supporting fundraising rounds, packaging technology for acquisition and drive go-to-market strategy for new products. Trusted by founders and C-suite to represent the technology at board level.
✅ linkedin.com/in/njgroene
Dutch
Native or bilingual
English
Native or bilingual
French
Native or bilingual
Can work on-site
Paris (up to 10km)
Experience
- AXA Group Operations, Computable Contract BUChief Technology & AI OfficerJanuary 2025 - Today (1 year and 5 months)Paris, FranceLed tech strategy for AXA's Computable Contracts unit. Restructured 30+ person cross-border product team (France, Spain, Switzerland). Transitioned legacy tech to AI platform, processing 2M+ claims annually worldwide.
- Platform impact: Industrialized an AI claims platform delivering lower costs (-1 pp leakage, 20% reduction in handling costs), happier customers (+5% Net Promoter Score) and increased revenue across AXA entities (+3% upsell in B2B2C channels)
- Team restructuring: Inherited and restructured a cross-functional organization spanning Engineering, Data Science, and Product - realigning roles, delivery processes, and technical leadership to support scaling across business lines.
- AI industrialisation: Moved agentic claims processing from proof-of-concept to production, making insurance logic computable by design and deployable across AXA entities. AI-first organisation design: Restructured the engineering and product organization around AI-augmented workflows - redefining roles, delivery cadences, and developer practices for a team building with agents and LLMs as primary tools.
- Impala Hub (AI Platform)Chief Product & Technology OfficerJanuary 2022 - January 2025 (3 years)Paris, FranceBuilt and launched a B2B sustainability intelligence platform from the ground up, combining structured supplier data with GenAI to power procurement decisions for global brands. Hands-on technical lead operating across Europe and Asia.
- Product & launch: Designed and shipped the core platform end-to-end, building one of the largest structured databases of sustainable suppliers in the plastics industry. Launched across 3+ markets with named enterprise
- Partnerships: Early GenAI adoption: Pioneered LLM-powered intelligence for material procurement, automating insights from fragmented sustainability data.
- Astek Alpha (AI Strategy)Co-founder & CTOJanuary 2021 - January 2022 (1 year)Paris, FranceCo-founded a boutique AI and product strategy unit as a spin-off from the Astek Group. Acquired 15 clients in the first 12 months and led acquisition due diligence on a target consulting firm to accelerate growth.
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Education
- M.Sc. (summa cum laude), Intelligence ArtificielleUniversity of Amsterdam2008M.Sc. (summa cum laude), Intelligence Artificielle
- M.A. (cum laude), NeuropsychologyUniversity of Amsterdam2003M.A. (cum laude), Neuropsychology