Data Booster
3 min read
July 1, 2026
Organizations are investing heavily in AI technology, yet the promised step-change keeps failing to materialize. The cause is rarely the technology, and almost always the people 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 company alongside founder Wouter Neef.
“Technology is rarely the hard part of a transformation; people are,” says Nanne Veldman. “I keep being surprised that organizations 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 organizations 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 program with the organization, 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 organization that had spent its entire budget on ChatGPT licenses 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 formalizes 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 organizations 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 organizations 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, organizational development & learning and commercial leadership. He spent a decade at Shell across HR and organizational 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 organization across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The expanded proposition builds on proven results. Data Booster has delivered programs to more than 10,000 professionals worldwide, with partners including SHV Energy, PostNL, Allianz Partners, PGGM, Jaarbeurs and Skyscanner.
Member of
Nominated
