Rowland Manthorpe
Moderator
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Rowland Manthorpe at HumanX Amsterdam 2026
Hiring, Firing & Reskilling with Agents
Joak Van der Poort said Remote pushed AI early, requiring every employee to complete an AI course and reporting engineering productivity rose about 500% between mid-last year and this year. He argued agents can automate HR and payroll bureaucracy, but compliance answers need grounding, references, human escalation, and iterative guardrails; AI hiring may scale an already flawed, impersonal process.
Building Sovereign AI
The panel framed sovereign AI as enterprise and national control over AI stacks, data centers, models, and supply chains rather than only model ownership. Speakers discussed the Cohere-Aleph Alpha partnership, European dependence on American capabilities, a 40,000,000 Dutch chip-design program, and enterprise patterns such as on-prem GPU stacks, model harnesses, and agnostic benchmarking to preserve optionality.