Anthonie Smith
Co-founder and CEO of And AI
Anthonie helps management teams at SME and mid-market organisations take AI from the boardroom to the shop floor. Where the opportunities are, what the EU AI Act asks of you, and how to bring your people along. He founded And AI in Groningen in 2025, together with Stefan Frans.
What Anthonie works on
From scattered experiments to a direction
Plenty of organisations have ten pilots and no direction. Anthonie walks through the processes where the time and the money actually sit: quotes, contract review, reporting cycles. That produces an order of play, with an estimate of what each step returns.
See our approachKnowing where you stand under the EU AI Act
The obligations apply from August 2026. Anthonie translates the law into what your organisation has to arrange now, and what can wait.
Take the AI scanBringing your people along
Technology is rarely the problem. Anthonie runs in-company sessions where teams work on their own documents and their own cases, so people see what AI does to their work before it is rolled out.
See workshopsCareer and background
Anthonie studied Management, Economics and Law at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, graduating in 2007 after internships in the HR departments of the UMCG hospital and the University of Groningen.
He then spent more than fifteen years between entrepreneurship and digital products. He was a financial adviser at SNS Bank during its shift to online banking, and co-owner of Sterkhouders (online marketing, websites and apps, including work for Samsung Benelux) and of Jolly Jellyfish, where one title reached the global top 10. At Bureau Voorkant he worked as a digital strategist on branding and concepts for digital products in healthcare and education, for clients including the UMCG and Wolters Noordhoff.
From 2020 to 2025 he was Head of Operations and later COO at Ancora Health, which grew from 5 to 65 people in that period. He was responsible for compliance (ISO 27001, NEN 7510, ISO 13485) and for customer and patient contact, and went through the pivot from health passports for employers to remote patient management. Ancora had earlier come in as a client at Bureau Voorkant, which is where he met Stefan.
Why And AI
Anthonie and Stefan met at Ancora Health, where Anthonie ran operations and Stefan built the marketing and automation stack through FriendlyWeb. They saw in their own work how quickly AI was changing what was possible, and started And AI in Groningen in 2025.
What they wanted to do differently is in the setup. Traditional AI agencies sell vision and strategy, in months-long projects with expensive proofs of concept. And AI delivers working solutions in weeks, built from smart combinations of existing tools, and hands them over so the client's own team can run them.
Articles by Anthonie
Let's talk
No sales pitch, just an introduction. Anthonie is happy to think along about where your organisation stands and what the logical next step is.