How does AI affect our organisation’s business model?

Concreet Onderwijsproducten is a publisher of educational materials for the construction sector. If you are training as a carpenter, bricklayer, roofer (or one of the other 28 construction-related programmes) at VMBO level, you work with examinations and teaching materials produced by Concreet Onderwijsproducten.

The challenge
Concreet Onderwijsproducten wants to understand the impact of AI on its business model. AI is developing at an extraordinary pace and appears to have enormous potential. This is particularly true now that language models (also known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT) are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of language and knowledge, precisely the core domain of a publishing company.

At the same time, working with AI raises many questions: where do you start? What are meaningful applications? Is it all just hype? And how do you build knowledge and capability in AI?

The insight
Together, we embarked on Expedition AI: an exploratory journey in which we examined, step by step, what AI is, how it affects our society and our understanding of knowledge, and the legal and ethical questions it raises. We met weekly to share insights, interpret them and translate them into the practical reality of Concreet Onderwijsproducten.

The key conclusion was clear: AI is not a standalone experiment or a temporary trend—it affects the very core of the business model. Concreet has therefore expressed the ambition to become AI-first. Not by replacing people, but by designing processes in such a way that AI performs the primary work and supports employees where their expertise adds the most value.

From this foundation, the focus shifted to concrete applications. Where can AI help to save time, reduce costs or improve quality? As a result, the emphasis was placed on clearly defining use cases: precisely identifying bottlenecks in processes so that technology can provide targeted support. Experiments were then carried out to develop solutions, which were ultimately implemented.

Expedition AI provided a strong foundation for the future:

• There is now a clear understanding of how fundamentally AI will affect the current business model of Concreet Onderwijsproducten.
• A development roadmap and collaboration model are in place, enabling the organisation, with our guidance, to become AI-first step by step.
• Four inspiring company visits offered an inside look at organisations that are already further along with AI and helped to make the next steps concrete.