About Marc Diks

How it started — a Kaypro 10 and a father who dared

When I was eight, my father put a Kaypro 10 on the table. Fourteen kilos. Ten megabytes of storage. No manual that made sense. My father had taught himself to program — mainly in DOS — and I watched, experimented, and built my first computer games. Not out of enthusiasm for technology as such, but because I wanted to know how things worked. What was possible. How far you could go.

That curiosity never disappeared.

After military service and a brief stint at a life insurer, I joined the family business in 1992: Diks Verzekeringen, founded in 1970 by my father as a local insurance brokerage in IJsselstein. Back then, he would visit customers door to door for a glass or contents policy. I saw something different.

From a 95-guilder ad to a national online insurer

The first experiment cost 95 guilders and nearly caused an argument with my father.

I wanted to place a three-line ad in the Speurder section of De Telegraaf — the pre-internet platform where the Netherlands bought and sold second-hand cars — for classic car insurance. My father thought it was far too expensive. Eventually he said: go ahead.

That Saturday, the phone never stopped ringing. By Monday we had closed dozens of policies. The ad ran for ten years.

That is how we gradually shifted from a local generalist to a national automotive specialist. With the arrival of the internet we launched www.diks.nl in 1997 — a few months before Google went live. We were early. So early that by 2009 we were already running live chat: a technology barely anyone used at the time. That taught me something you cannot learn from a book: being first is no guarantee of success. Timing is everything, and timing you only learn by doing.

We were also the first insurer in the Netherlands where consumers could calculate and take out a classic car policy entirely online. Later I expanded the offering with 112schade.nl, a platform that provided free claims recovery services for motorists — it quickly grew to over a thousand files per month.

In 2018 we sold Diks Verzekeringen to Voogd & Voogd, merged both advisory organisations and my sister and I continued to run the new entity. In 2021 Voogd merged with the Heilbron Group to form Alpina Group — and I progressed from director of Diks to Cluster Director Online and ultimately Managing Director Online and member of the Management Board.

Applying AI inside a real organisation — what it truly means

At Alpina Group I share responsibility for the AI strategy of an organisation with more than 2,200 employees, operating in one of the most regulated sectors in the Netherlands.

That is a fundamentally different challenge from writing about AI.

My first major AI project was integrating AI into the development process via Cursor. It took more than a year before developers started using it structurally. Rightly sceptical, in part: you have less control over your codebase. But also inevitable. By now, nobody needs to be convinced it works.

What I learn in practice — and what you rarely read in a whitepaper:

• Factual reliability remains a serious problem.

  Especially in a regulated environment like insurance, where incorrect advice has legal and financial consequences. AI models sound confident even when they are wrong.

• Newer is not always better.

  The differences between frontier models are large, and a new version can perform significantly worse on specific tasks than its predecessor. You need to keep testing.

• Costs are rising.

  Token prices increase, context windows are constrained. AI integration in production environments becomes expensive quickly. That is a boardroom question, not an IT question.

The organisations that understand this — and do not just embrace the hype — are the organisations that will still be relevant in five years.

How I think about leadership

I believe in Rogers' adoption curve. Not everyone is an innovator. Not everyone needs to be. But in my team I want people who embrace change. I say this explicitly in interviews: if you do not like change, we are not a match.

My approach to resistance is not to force but to create awareness. Sharing my vision every week, inspiring, giving people space to experience what is possible themselves — and taking the time. People need to discover it for themselves. Then it sticks.

At the same time I create an environment where experimenting is normal. Where a failed experiment is not failure, but data. A/B testing is not a marketing term for me — it is a way of life.

The Marathon des Sables — and what deserts teach me about organisations

In 2025 my wife and I climbed Kilimanjaro (5,895 metres) and in 2026 I completed the Marathon des Sables (MDS): 270 kilometres through the Sahara in seven days. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to find my limit.

The finest moment at the MDS: three in the morning, alone in the desert, under a sky full of stars I had never seen so clearly. No sound. No light. Only the crunch of sand.

What that teaches me about leading an organisation in transition: preparation determines outcome, but along the way you always encounter things you did not foresee. How you deal with that — that is the difference. Not the strategy on paper, but the choices you make when things do not go as planned.

I am currently training for a marathon personal best and a full Ironman. The constant state of dissatisfaction works perfectly here too.

When to come to me

I am available for a limited number of roles as:

I am currently fully active at Alpina Group and deliberately keep my availability limited. Quality over quantity.

Key facts

Frequently asked questions about Marc Diks