Two days in Ghent: Dropsolid AI management off-site

Two days away from the day-to-day with the Dropsolid AI management team in Ghent. No clients, no Slack urgencies, just the team and some hard questions about where we are going.

I almost did not make it there rested. I normally drive, but the traffic to Ghent is brutal: 1.5 to 2 hours one way on a good day. I slept badly, took the train instead, and ended up writing a blog post on the way there. The train was the right call.

I had Crucial Conversations (Grenny et al.) for the train. Good book, reads faster than most. By the time I arrived, I had made a dent in it. Off-sites sometimes get tense. Ours did not.

What we worked on

Frans Riemersma ran a session on Value Based Selling, built around a Feature2Value Map. The framework flips the usual sales instinct: instead of leading with features, you start from what the client says, map it back to the value it creates, and only then connect it to a feature. It sounds obvious. It is harder than it looks. Frans had a quote that landed well in the room:

"The client's delay is god's gift for consultants."

Paulina Ryters-Menapace pitched one of our AI chatbot cases. The framing was sharp: not another generic AI assistant, but one that stays strictly within your content, has guardrails built in by default, and gives you an observability layer so you can see what questions users are actually asking. The distinction between "deterministic chatbot" and "generic AI chatbot" and "our product" was clear.

Dominique presented the personalisation case: combining CMS and marketing automation to deliver personalised experiences at scale. The AI adapts content based on who the visitor is, using data from both systems together.

Where Dropsolid AI creates value

The off-site sharpened our focus on three areas where we have real proof:

Reducing manual customer support. One case has customers handling 92% of support tickets automatically, resolved by AI directly on the website. No lock-in, stays compliant. That number gets attention in every conversation.

Turning the website into a conversation. Organisations that deploy the AI chatbot start learning what visitors and agents actually want. Frans's data point: engagement doubles. That is a growth opportunity most organisations have not yet connected to their website.

Quality content at scale. The AI uses your content to have the conversation. No content, no conversation. This reframes content investment from a cost to a prerequisite for growth, and makes it urgent for organisations that have been putting it off.

All three run on Drupal AI and Dropsolid AI. The team flew in from Portugal, Spain, Germany, the US, and Greece. For a fully remote company, that is not nothing.

What came out of it

We are going to focus more on the use cases that are proven to work for clients. Not building in every direction at once, but doubling down on what delivers real value. Roles are a bit clearer now. That matters for a distributed team.

We have been working together for a year. This photo is the first time we were all in the same room at the same time. For a fully distributed team, that is a milestone worth noting.

Written with assistance from Dobbie, Frederik's AI assistant.