Joël Van Hoolandt — Fractional CTO | Magma Consulting

Today we step into the next phase of our public-sector collaboration in Belgium: Version 2 of a major Microsoft Dynamics setup, running from now through the end of the calendar year. This isn’t about tearing up what exists; it’s about evolving it with clearer intent and kinder edges — for the public servant at the console, the citizen checking a status, and the enterprise navigating obligations without drama. Version 2 is where the system grows up : fewer apologies, fewer workarounds, and far fewer mysteries hidden behind buttons. Think of it as the stretch from “it works” to “it works, holds up under pressure, and doesn’t need a pep talk on Monday morning.” Our Version 2 Agile approach starts with outcomes, not theatrics: we organise around service journeys, not modules, and measure progress by what gets simpler for real people. Discovery and delivery run together, with small batches that ship on a dependable rhythm, and “show the thing” reviews designed to be interesting enough th...

If you want to see what’s really moving this summer, stop scrolling announcements and open the AI dashboard at artificialanalysis.ai . It turns noise into shape by lining up models against costs, context windows, and measured competence. You can watch the price-to-performance frontier inch forward—cheap “utility” models becoming surprisingly capable while high-end “reasoners” stake out narrower, high-impact domains. The mood isn’t hype so much as compression: more capability per euro, and less tolerance for waste. What can you actually learn there? Costs are no longer a mysterious line item; the dashboard breaks out input and output token pricing, surfaces latency and throughput, and lets you weigh long-context promises against the realities of speed and budget. Intelligence is treated with some humility—scores across reasoning, coding, and language offer texture rather than a single crown, a reminder that what counts as “smart” depends on the job at hand. That perspective makes it ...

Across Europe, the calendar softens in July and August. Beaches and mountain trails fill, inboxes slow to a humane pace, and many leaders finally find the untidy, generative space to connect ideas that have been jostling for attention since spring. Out of that quiet comes a different kind of energy: not the brittle rush of deadlines, but the steadier conviction that follows perspective. It’s often in these warm weeks that AI stops being a headline and starts to look like something you can actually touch, shape, and put to work. Back under the sun, speculation also matures. Will we see IPOs from OpenAI and Anthropic, and what would public markets demand in return—clearer governance, more predictable unit economics, sharper answers on the compute supply chain? Or will a new player, perhaps from an unexpected European lab or an open-source coalition, announce something smaller yet smarter: a model that sips power, understands context, and nestles into actual workflows rather than chasi...