2026: Christian de Neef moderated the EU regulations panel and opened with findings from his AI maturity model.

Two Profiles, One Gap
Small companies are strong on skills and technology but weak on strategy and governance. Large companies have more strategy but lag elsewhere. Both are behind on compliance: less than a third say their use cases conform to the AI Act.

Hidden Risk Levels
In a project with a health insurer, processing invoices turned out to reveal patients' conditions, which changed the risk level of a seemingly simple use case.

Human in the Loop, or Rubber Stamp?
When volumes are too high, human oversight risks becoming box-ticking, like an executive signing a pile of documents unread at the end of the day. "Many leaders and boards are not aware yet of their personal responsibilities."

Self-Regulation Has a Track Record
On the voluntary accord announced in Washington by US AI providers, Christian recalled that self-regulation has worked poorly in sectors such as agri-food and chemicals.

Provider or Deployer?
Many organisations do not know their role under the AI Act. If they fine-tune a model, distil one or build a RAG on their own data, are they a provider or a deployer? That uncertainty is part of what leaves them feeling lost.

Governance is dynamic, not static. The governance model matters more than any single rule.

2025: At the Panoramai AI Summit, Christian de Neef, a transformation consultant from FastTrack in Brussels, delivered sobering insights about the gap between AI perception and reality in organizations. Drawing on decades of experience in knowledge management since the early 1990s, he provided evidence-based frameworks for understanding true AI organizational maturity.

The Maturity Assessment Reality Check

Christian revealed concerning research findings from FastTrack's independent AI maturity assessment. "There is a huge gap between perceived AI readiness and maturity, and actual AI maturity in organizations," he emphasized, describing systematic overconfidence where conference audiences consistently rate themselves at level three or above on a five-point scale while independent testing reveals much lower capabilities.

Strategic Direction Without Strategy

"What we see a lot if we talk about AI readiness today, is that organizations are experimenting, they're playing, they're doing things because they feel they have to do AI, because everyone is doing it. But with no clear path, with no clear roadmap, with no clear goal currently." Christian identified this as a fundamental problem plaguing AI adoption—activity without purpose, driven by competitive pressure rather than strategic vision.

The Human-Organizational Focus

Christian emphasized FastTrack's distinctive approach: focusing on culture, governance, strategy, and upskilling rather than technology deployment. "We work on governance, on change management, on organization... not from the technology point of view, but from the human and organizational point of view."

Governance Architecture Philosophy

Christian advocated for comprehensive governance frameworks extending beyond policies to operational practice. "Governance goes all the way down to the bottom... it goes even down to operations, and how we support the people that want to experiment and how do we actually measure what is going on."

Collective Intelligence Vision

"The organizations where we actually combine artificial intelligence and collective intelligence, meaning the intelligence of the employees that come together, that actually share their prompts, that work together on processes." Christian positioned collaborative AI adoption as superior to individual experimentation.

Process Transformation Warning

Christian warned against repeating historical automation mistakes: "If the only thing we're doing with AI is personal productivity or it is incremental improvement on existing processes, then basically we're doing the same than 10 or 20 years ago, when we had paper-based processes and we were automating the existing processes but without changing them."

Key Achievement

Christian demonstrated how organizational maturity assessment can reveal hidden gaps in AI readiness, positioning leaders to move beyond experimentation toward strategic transformation through human-centered change management and collaborative intelligence frameworks.