CXO at PwC’s experience center in Amsterdam

In the waning days of 2017, I embarked on a transformative venture with PwC, joining the vanguard of their European Experience Center. PwC, a beacon of legal and financial acumen, was branching into a novel service—human-centric design infused with cutting-edge technology. Within this nexus, our team emerged as architects of the future, advising C-suite leaders through a fusion of economic foresight, social trends, technical innovation, and behavioral insights.

Our alchemy of expertise birthed revolutionary brand concepts, products, services, and a suite of pioneering projects. This odyssey not only honed my business acumen at the zenith of corporate strategy but also continued to spotlight my voice in international juries. My journey crescendoed with a keynote at Kyurious in India, a testament to the resonance of our transformative work in the global arena.

Unilever Plastic dashboard & PwCO2 dashboard.

Unilever has a global sustainable task. By 2025 they want all of their plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable. To support them in their journey we have created a “plastic dashboard” This dashboard will visualise product by product the current status, and a roadmap to improve the packaging of this project.

While working on the Unilever dashboard we also created a PwCO2 Dashboard. The goal of PwC is to become CO2 Neutral before 2030. In order to reach this goal we have decided to create a personal employee CO2 Dashboard. On this dashboard all 3000 employees of the Amsterdam office can monitor their individual, team and department CO2 usages.

Via tips and trick people can share how to safe CO2, how to become more CO2 aware. And a dedicated team will share all kinds of relevant models and exercises in order to activate all employees in this journey.

My start at PwC at the end of 2017.

At the end of 2017, I was invited by PwC to join their experience centre team. The experience centre is a new concept within PwC. The first EC started in the US in 2014 and now we have got over 48 global units. The EC team consist out of, for PwC, unique talents. Where the core business of the firm always has been financial and tax consultants, the EC team focuses on brand and product innovation. By using consumer insights, emerging technology, strong strategic and conceptual thinking power. I feel working at PwC with my profile is truly pioneering. It is hard at times, but very rewarding too. We have worked in several interesting projects, first for service offered by PwC for their clients. But more and more we work on consumer and society facing project. I feel proud to call myself “chief experience” at the Amsterdam office. Where we doubled the team in 2 years, increased the turn over with 300% and getting in new people and projects on a monthly basis.

Here are a few projects that we have. worked on.

Our experience center creative reel.

Welcome to the experience centre.

Being from the world of communication, I felt we needed to have a strong conversation starter. Our team is unique and therefore new to the consultancy arena. Therefore we needed to throw a rock in the pond at the beginning of the meeting. To immediately show (of) our skills set. The work used in this video is partly created by the experience centre, and partly created by people in our team at previous jobs.

The Future of Work project.

The future of work.
For our HR team, we have created a 2-day event that we called “the future of work”. For this, we organised sessions and workshop that all focussed on the fact that how we work is rapidly changing. How we move from a world where we needed to own things, to a world where we need to have access to things. In the middle of this transformation stands “the digital revolution”. Next to organizing the whole event, we created this video to start the conversations.

The Mercedes Benz “car DNA” project.

Mercedes Benz.
Even a famous car brand like Mercedes faces the same challenge as all other brands: consumers trust the car when it is new, but feel doubt when it is a second-hand car. Yet most new Mercedes customers buy a new one every 3 years. Leading to football fields filled with second-hand 3-year-old Mercedeses. How to build trust in the hearts and minds of the consumer? We did the most obvious thing . . . We share the full DNA of the car. This is exactly what the dealer ánd the consumer want to have: all data, from the first flat tire to the most recent service turn, everything is shared openly. Truly proving the value of the car. And rebuilding trust at the dealer and the consumer at the same time. Then we added a smart AI-driven algorithm into the online platform. With this, the platform will learn from the visitors' behaviour. But this the platform automatically changes its design and UX flow around the uses preferences. Automatically.

The ING Bank project.

ING Bank.
Every bank has a team of “risk managers”. These financial experts monitor all actions from all clients of the bank. To make sure that the relation between the bank and these companies will not be at any risk. Are they investing in an unknown company, are they hiring a new CEO with a doubtful background? And far more complicated details that might endanger the relationship. This work is hard labour since it is done by hand. These risk managers need to follow all news, off and online to monitor the actions and where about of all clients. Not only is this hard work . . . It is also easy to miss out on something. For this, we collaborated with Google and we created an “early warning system”. this unique tool supports the risk managers. And brings more trust and security to the bank. After the test phase, the app and platform are now fully in use. The ING Bank is the first bank globally to use a tool like this.

How AI will change life for HR.

Living with Robots, the future of HR in relation to AI.
AI and Robotics will take a bigger piece of our daily lives in the years to come. This brings a lot of excitement to some, but also a feeling of unease to many. “Will Robots take my job?” . . . “Do my children’s have a future?”. For some reason, this new development also brings a wave of uncertainty. For this we created JINN. Jinn is a humanoid robot created fully out of 3D printed materials at PwC’s experience centre. You Can follow JINN on LinkedIn and Instagram. It shared the experience of the life of a modern robot. For this, we have created a series of videos. To emphasize the fact that robots will be part of our daily life, but won't be able to do a human task. Chatting at the coffee machine will be for humans only . . . For now.

What is “experience”?

Welcome to the experience center.
For the first period, it was a challenge to explain the role of the experience centre to our large team of consultants. Most consultants our strong in their rational thinking. And we focus on human needs and desires. Together, these 2 sides of the business brain, can solve the new tasks at hand. In order to explain this, we created a small experience centre brand movie.

Strategic workforce planning.

Strategic Workforce Planning, the platform.
When a company is considering investing in new technology, soft or hardware, it is sometimes hard to foresee or even predicted the influence this decision might have in regards to the internal transformation. For this, we have created a smart platform that contains all data sets. When we change something in the data sets the whole platform, just like at Apple, changes around our decision. With this, it will give our client a good insight on all implications a new investment or decision might have . . . Before they make it. Quit important in today vibrant business environment.

Creating a digital platform for Interfood.

The future of Interfood.
Interfood is a global leader in food ingredients. Think of them as the perfect middle man for your food company. They have an extended network of the best suppliers from all over the world. But their work is now mainly done by people, with a lot of love and attention. To bring this company into the digital era we created an online trade platform for them. For the pitch, we decided not to show them the UX design of the platform, sketches of wireframes or other practical things. We decided to show them 2 movies. One portrays an existing client, as he speaks about the benefits of this new platform. The other is from the point of view of an employee. Truly landing the emotions at the client: “we need this platform, today”.

As seen by an employee:

As seen by a client:

ABN AMRO Bank, office 360 introduction.

Everyone in the cloud.
It is hard for people to cope with change. Yet the only constant to life is change. To support the bank with their shift to Office 360 we have created the “personal space” project. Here we connected “working in the cloud” to having more personal space. And it is up to every employee to determine with whom to share this space and with whom not. In this wat we shifted from a negative “change is coming” message to amore positive “you will get more personal space” one. Here is the launch video we created.

The experience center, pleased to meet you.

To launch our concept we needed to introduce the unique profiles of people we have in the experience center. For this we got inspired by the Netflix serie Abstract. In case you dont know the series it is about creators. An architect, and engineers at MIT, a car designer, Tinker the Nike Air Jordan designer and much more. Every episode portrays them in a personal and working enviorment. This we wanted to grasp in our videos. We created 4. Me, the creative leader. Ayhan, the development genius, Alexandros the business designer and this one . . . Isabellle, our technical engineer who we hired from Silicon Valley.

One out of 4 profile video’s, Isabelle: