Stefan Frans
Co-founder and CTO of And AI
Stefan builds the AI that actually ends up running in production: agents, knowledge assistants and workflow automation for SME and mid-market organisations. He works with Claude Code, the Anthropic Agent SDK, n8n and MCP, and pays most attention to what happens after the prototype works. He founded And AI in Groningen in 2025, together with Anthonie Smith.
What Stefan works on
Agents that sit inside your own systems
A chatbot alongside your work helps nobody. Stefan builds agents that go into your existing systems: reading from your CRM, writing back into your ticketing system, and a person on the button for anything that goes out.
See custom solutionsA harness around your AI
A prototype that works once tells you little. Stefan sets up the layer around it: fixed instructions, memory, tests and logging, so you can see what the model did and why.
Read about harnessesLearning to build it yourself
Stefan runs technical sessions for developers and analysts: working with Claude Code, the Agent SDK and MCP, on your own codebase and with your own data.
See workshopsCareer and background
Stefan studied Human Technology at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. In April 2011, straight after finishing, he started working for himself with FriendlyWeb: user research, UX design, websites and webshops, and later marketing automation.
From 2015 to 2017 he also ran e-simple, built around the idea of a working website in a single day. At WerkPro that model ran aground on an organisation of sixty operating companies. He trained up their in-house web team there instead of taking the work over.
Through FriendlyWeb he built the marketing and automation stack at Ancora Health. That is where he met Anthonie.
Why And AI
Stefan worked for himself for fifteen years, from user research and websites through to marketing automation. At Ancora Health he built the stack and met Anthonie. When AI started to change the building itself, that was the reason to start And AI together in 2025.
What he wanted to do differently comes out of those years: a prototype that only runs at the agency leaves the client with nothing. And AI therefore delivers solutions that sit inside the client's own systems, with a team that can run and extend them afterwards.
Something to build
Do you have a concrete idea, or a prototype that keeps stalling on the last step to production? Stefan is happy to look at what it takes to get it working.