AI Deployment Lead – Antwerp

Waterland is hiring an AI Deployment Lead to help portfolio companies across Belgium and France turn AI ambition into practical solutions with measurable business impact.

At the intersection of AI technology, operations, strategy and value creation, you will work directly with portfolio company management teams, functional leaders and Waterland’s investment and value creation teams. This role is about helping strong mid-market businesses evolve into AI-native market leaders. You will identify high-value opportunities, design and deploy practical AI and agentic automation solutions, and embed them into day-to-day operations to create a structural competitive advantage.

Your objective is clear: translate AI adoption into measurable business outcomes, from productivity gains and operational efficiency to revenue growth, margin expansion, EBITDA improvement and accelerated international scalability.

What will be your impact?

As an AI Deployment Lead, you will take end-to-end ownership of AI deployment across multiple portfolio companies. You will not operate as a strategist on the sidelines, but as a hands-on builder and operator who turns opportunities into production-grade solutions.

Your responsibilities include:

  • Identify and deploy AI use cases that move the needle across revenue growth, pricing, productivity, procurement, finance, customer operations and margin expansion.
  • Turn business friction into AI-native workflows, agents and decision-support tools that teams actually adopt.
  • Build and ship fast: from opportunity sizing and business validation to data readiness, prototyping, integrations, live deployment and change adoption.
  • Make AI work in real mid-market environments with legacy systems, fragmented processes and imperfect data, orchestrating the right mix of platforms, vendors and internal capabilities.
  • Define deployment roadmaps, technical requirements and implementation priorities, and remove execution barriers to move initiatives beyond pilots into scaled business transformation.
  • Measure business impact, scale what works, and build reusable AI playbooks, agent capabilities and deployment patterns across the portfolio.
  • Work in team with Waterland’s international AI Deployment Leads and central AI Hub to share learnings, accelerate execution and continuously raise the bar.

What we are looking for

We are looking for an exceptional applied AI leader: someone who has successfully deployed AI, automation, software or data-driven solutions in real operating environments and linked these directly to measurable business results.

You may come from applied AI, forward-deployed engineering, product engineering, operational consulting, technical transformation, scale-ups, enterprise software, or private equity value creation. What matters is your pattern: you turn business opportunities into working solutions that improve productivity, margins and market leadership.

Must-haves

  • You have successfully built and deployed AI, automation or software-enabled solutions in production environments: beyond demos, pilots or slideware;
  • You are technically fluent across Python, APIs, systems integrations, data workflows, workflow automation, LLM tooling, agentic systems and modern AI platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Databricks or equivalent technologies;
  • You understand how to move from business opportunity to architecture, build, deployment and user adoption;
  • You combine strong technical depth with commercial sharpness and can separate AI hype from real business value;
  • You are confident engaging with senior management teams, business owners, IT leaders, software vendors, implementation partners and investment professionals;
  • You have strong prioritisation and execution capabilities, and thrive in dynamic, entrepreneurial and high-performance environments;
  • You enjoy building, solving and operating hands-on, while maintaining strategic oversight across multiple parallel initiatives.

In addition, you

  • Are fluent in English and Dutch;
  • Have a strong working knowledge of French, or are comfortable operating in French-speaking business environments;
  • Are willing to travel regularly across Europe, primarily in Belgium and France.

What do we offer?

You will work with ambitious portfolio companies, exceptional management teams, talented investment professionals and Waterland’s AI Hub in a fast-moving, international environment across multiple industries.

By combining local ownership with cross-border AI expertise, you will help transform successful businesses into AI-native market leaders, creating measurable impact on growth, efficiency and long-term value.

Requirements added by the job poster
• Authorized to work in Belgium