A practical story — and a working approach for your early-warning risk dashboard.
Not a strategy deck. A field report — what worked, what didn't, what surprised us.
We help our customers understand and act on what's happening in the field — on shelves and in outlets — at scale.
We sit on millions of pictures, receipts, and outlet records. AI changes what we can do with that.
You type. You get an answer — sometimes a document, a plan, an image. Genuinely useful. Term-based: I put something in, I get something out.
For most of us at Roamler, this is what AI meant for two years.
You give a goal. The AI plans, takes actions, calls tools, browses, drafts and corrects. The role flips entirely.
Also: the integrations matured. Claude in Excel, Chrome, PowerPoint, terminals. Suddenly real.
If your AI thinking is still from Era 1, you're solving last year's problem.
Three stages of becoming AI-first. Our experience: building them roughly in this order has been the strongest path for Roamler.
Give everyone the tools. AI as personal cruise-control. The foundation: if people don't have it, the next two stages don't really land.
AI runs the process. Human becomes the human-in-the-loop, not the other way around. Real automation, with judgement.
AI shows up in what you sell. For us: customers can use their AI to interact with ours. New propositions become possible.
We started with Open Web UI — an open-source chat front-end, multiple model providers, our own knowledge added. We called it co-pilot.roamler and made sure everyone in the company got the introduction.
When the agentic shift happened in January 2026, we did a second pass through the whole company — this time introducing Claude on an enterprise licence, with data residency taken care of.
Why two rounds: the tool we deployed in Era 1 was not the tool that mattered in Era 2. Each shift deserved its own conversation.
co-pilot.roamler — where it all started for our team.
We do this to become more efficient. That's the point. Pretending otherwise is patronising.
Concrete: our HR team is three people for ~100 FTE. We've told them openly — "Wouldn't it be amazing if you could run this with two?"
Same for almost every role. Over time, some people will move on. When they do, they'll be far more valuable than if we'd hidden the change from them.
Give people the tools, be honest about what's changing, and you maximise their options — not just yours.
When you give everyone AI, you have to be explicit. We wrote down ten rules and ask every employee to read them. A few of the most important:
AI is a power tool, not a colleague. The operator is always responsible.
Roamler's 10 Golden Rules — published, signed off, on every onboarding checklist.
I run an agentic framework on my own machine. I talk to "my CEO". It manages several entities — Roamler-adjacent, a side project, my local sailing club.
This year's full sailing-season administration — classes, registrations, communications — happened almost entirely autonomously, after one setup.
If I can do this for a volunteer sailing club, your Investment Managers can do it for partner monitoring.
Last weekend I vibe-coded a small tool for my sailing school — WSV De Breek.
Total build time: 60 minutes.
A year ago this would have been a project. Now it's a Saturday afternoon — built by someone with no spare time and no graphic designer.
Once people have mastered Stage 1 — when AI is second nature — they start automating their own work. The question shifts.
Old question: "How can AI help me do this task?"
New question: "What's left for me to do at all?"
The role flips. Human in the loop, not human in the driver's seat.
Two real examples next — both running in production at Roamler today.
40 to 50 reviewers, day-in day-out, approve or reject what Roamlers send in. Approve → Roamler gets paid. Reject → they redo it.
Manual, repetitive, slow. Perfect target.
So we set out to automate it — and we did not pick one approach. We are running four in parallel.
Use the task's questionnaire as context, generate decision rules.
Train on years of reviewer decisions.
Glue + LLM steps. We may drop this — and that's fine.
Multiple agents iterate on each other's judgements.
Some of these will fail. That is the point. Only one needs to win.
Roamlers photograph receipts. Two thousand a week tells us what the Netherlands buys at Action.
Rules are simple. AI applies them autonomously:
AI approves. Roamler gets paid. Edge cases → human review. Appeal → human review.
Autonomy needs boundaries and an audit trail. That's it.
When we put AI into our products, our customers' AI can talk to ours. That's a new conversation — and a new market.
For 10 years we collected shelf photos and shipped them to a specialist for image recognition. They counted facings, share-of-shelf, planogram compliance.
Last year I tried something. I trained a model — myself — that measures the metre marks on a shelf to anchor facing counts.
A year earlier this would have been weeks of expert work. Now it's a Tuesday afternoon.
We can do what they did. AI shrunk the moat.
If you can climb up the value chain, do it now. Because if you don't, someone else will climb past you.
Everyone improves their own work — encouraged. But as management, we're explicitly investing in one direction and the bets that feed into it.
We move from "we collect data and execute tasks" to "we predict — and execute — the right next action" for our customers in every store and outlet.
Every step of the customer + Roamler journey, automated. Knowledge captured in the org, not in heads. Human only where humans matter.
Move up the value chain — take over what specialist partners used to do. The intelligence we need to recommend the next action.
3M outlets across Europe, AI-enriched. Send field sales reps to the outlets most likely to convert — the next action made smarter.
Anyone who builds with Cloud Code can publish a dashboard or agent safely, without depending on IT. The risk of not doing this is bigger than the risk of doing it.
The picture we're working towards: a frictionless experience for both client and team, from intake to invoicing.
This is the diagram we walk every Roamler through. It's how everyone keeps the bigger picture in mind while building their piece.
None of these are about models. All of them are about people, pace, and money.
Build the 3-week MVP, not the 9-month dream.
Try four approaches at once. Most will fail. The cost of trying is near zero. The cost of not trying is that a competitor — or your own back-office — gets there first.
In hindsight at Roamler: we were too slow adapting our roadmap to the new cadence. The technology was moving in weeks; we were still planning in quarters.
Last month we automated a Roamler messaging flow. I showed the team Claude Code + Playwright. They saw it. They liked it.
Their reply: "Let's discuss this at our offsite on May 28."
The AI is already doing the work. The humans are scheduling a meeting about whether to start.
Most delays cost more than the implementation does.
If your AI lead builds everything, they become the bottleneck — and the org never develops the muscle.
The job is to:
If you build, you become responsible. If you enable, the organisation becomes responsible.
Lesson learned twice
This is the People pillar in practice. It is — bluntly — immoral to withhold this technology from your colleagues. They see what's possible. They want to do better work. Help them.
And: if you don't give people enterprise tools, they will use their personal accounts. That is your real data risk.
Compare €200/month per person to even one day of a consultant. The math isn't close.
If you don't give people enterprise AI tools, they will use their own — personal ChatGPT, personal Claude, free tiers, browser extensions.
And they won't tell you, because they're afraid the answer will be no.
The choice isn't AI or no AI. It's sanctioned AI, or shadow AI.
Our experience at Roamler: the moment we rolled out enterprise Claude broadly, the personal-account question went away. Not because we banned anything — because the official tools became better than the unofficial ones.
Lesson: out-compete shadow IT. Don't try to police it.
Anthropic. OpenAI. Microsoft. Google. Pick two or three. Get them all approved.
This is why we started with Open Web UI — one chat interface, swap the model behind it as the landscape changes.
Single-vendor lock-in is the largest avoidable AI risk you have.
Today Anthropic is subsidising heavily. That cannot last forever. Plan accordingly.
Honest: this is something I do privately, not yet enough at Roamler scale. But it's on my list.
I have a personal agent that emails me a daily token-burn report. One recent 24-hour burst: $500 of tokens on a heavy job. Subsidised today. Not forever.
Match the model to the task. Treat tokens like cloud bills — not like Wi-Fi.
Today it's a curiosity. Within a year, it'll be a line item the CFO asks about.
When we gave Claude Code to everyone, different people solved similar problems in wildly different ways.
That feels chaotic. It is also where the insight lives.
Differences in solutions reveal differences in how people actually work. That's the gold.
Have AI write the code once. Then run that code forever — zero tokens.
Use LLMs only where you actually need judgement.
AI builds the system. The system runs cheap.
AI sits on top, where it actually adds value.
This is also the answer to "what about compliance / data residency / cost?" — keep tokens where they earn their keep.
Every prompt. Every input. Every output. Every decision. Every escalation. Logged, traceable, queryable.
For Oikocredit this is doubly true: the trail of a partner decision is part of your impact story.
Every meeting. Every customer call. Every field visit. AI loves unstructured text. The corpus compounds. The more data you have, the stronger the system becomes.
For your Investment Managers visiting partners on the ground — these notes are gold. Tomorrow's risk signal is hidden in last quarter's site-visit transcripts.
There are real risks here too.
The bigger lesson: get your data policy right before you scale the corpus. The win is real, but only if the foundation is solid.
Start with non-sensitive data:
Build the muscle. Then expand into sensitive data with proper enterprise contracts in place.
You have ~80 internal policies. Finding the gaps and overlaps used to be a multi-month project. With Claude Code on a pilot account, that's a one-day exercise.
No personal data. No external transfer risk. Massive win.
It usually isn't. Yours included. That is normal.
Build something with what you have. The first model will tell you which data actually matters. Then upgrade the sensors that matter.
The cleanest data plan is the one you discover after building the first version.
If I'm honest about our own journey, the two biggest regrets are both about speed.
We waited too long on too many things — clarity, governance, the perfect tool. Almost every time, just starting would have been the right call.
The People stage takes longer than you think. We could have started the org-wide rollout earlier, with less polish. The people who eventually thrived would have thrived sooner.
A tool that doesn't work well today often works fine in three months. Claude Code went from "interesting" to "essential" in one quarter. Image generators kept getting better while we'd already stopped trying.
Speed in adoption beats elegance in design. And give the rejected tools a second look every quarter.
Now — your case.
They click. They see the chain of evidence. They call the Investment Manager. The Investment Manager is on the ground in 48 hours.
That conversation used to start three months later, after the quarterly report.
Three weeks from now, that can be real. Here's how.
Internal momentum is real. The next step is making sure every risk officer, Investment Manager and regional director has enterprise-grade tools and time to use them.
Integrate the data. Automate the monitoring. Surface the alert. Free your Investment Managers from manual triage; let them focus on the partner conversation.
Could partners themselves benefit from your early-warning intelligence? A premium service? An impact differentiator? Worth a separate conversation.
You have the data. You have indicators. You don't have the integrated view. This is an integration problem.
Moody's tells you too late. Local news, fora and parliament feeds know first. This is a sensing problem.
A real early-warning dashboard solves both.
→ Per partner, per region, per portfolio. Alerts to the right human, at the right moment.
Run them in parallel. They reinforce each other: better indicators feed a better dashboard, external signals enrich the partner view, the predictive layer ties it all together.
Feed the existing framework + 15 years of history to AI. Ask what predicts default best. Validate with the risk team.
Output: empirically weighted indicator list.
KRI traffic lights + scatter diagrams in the existing visual language, per partner, region, portfolio. Direct from the data warehouse.
Output: living dashboard, not a quarterly PDF.
~30 country-specific agents crawling news, parliament, fora. Cheap LLM filters noise; smart LLM synthesises.
Output: daily country/partner signals.
ML on 15 years of partner history + macro + visit notes. Predicts default probability and drivers.
Output: partner-level forward score.
Some tracks will mature faster than others. All four feed the same partner view in the end.
The strategic work is already done — a solid framework exists:
Now feed this and 15 years of actual data to AI.
Ask:
Risk team validates the candidates. The existing framework gets quantified, not replaced.
Direct from your data warehouse. Not Excel. Not quarterly.
Claude Code + your data warehouse + the existing indicator spec. Working prototype in days. Production-quality MVP in three weeks.
Yes — also run the planned Excel version in parallel. They reinforce each other. The Excel version is your fallback and your validator.
| Indicator | Watch | Limit | Q2 '25 | Q3 '25 | Q4 '25 | Q1 '26 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAR30++ | ≥5% | ≥10% | 9% | 12% | 9% | 4.5% | Green |
| Missed payments (12m) | ≥10 | ≥20 | 9 | 12 | 15 | 23 | Red |
| Covenant breaches | ≥20 | ≥50 | 11 | 17 | 15 | 25 | Amber |
| Write-offs | ≥0.5% | ≥1% | 0.7% | 0.8% | 5% | 1% | Red |
| OSS < 105% | 20 | 30 | 18 | 23 | 25 | 44 | Red |
| FX gap | ≥15% | ≥20% | 12% | 13% | 13% | 15% | Amber |
Plus an External signals column (Track 3): "3 amber signals from Ghana news this week." Plus a Predicted column (Track 4): probability of default in 90 days. That is the dashboard.
Per country, a continuous agent that crawls:
Note: this is exactly what you proved with the Ghana agri experiment. Now: scale across 30 countries.
15 years of partner history is a serious training set.
"What was the early signal we missed?" is now a query, not a post-mortem.
Start with a small validated set. Backtest against known incidents. Iterate. The agricultural-partner pilot is your seed.
Sources stay where they are. The AI layer reads from them; it doesn't replace them. This is incremental, not a migration project.
Two people. One from risk. One from data. Three weeks blocked. That's the team.
Honest caveat: three weeks is realistic in technology terms. In organisation terms, it depends on how quickly the people involved can decide, review and respond. The code is rarely what slows this down — the humans around it usually are.
Same logic as Roamler's receipt approval. Boundaries plus audit equals safe autonomy.
For the risk dashboard specifically. It's one important process — and there are dozens more behind it. But this is a strong place to start, with a clear outcome and a real audience.
And in parallel — don't forget People. The risk dashboard is the tip of an iceberg. To get the rest, every Investment Manager, risk officer, regional director and back-office colleague needs the tools too. That's a separate decision — and an equally important one.
The cost of trying is collapsing. The cost of not trying is being passed.
All that's left is to go.
Slides, code, and a starter repo available on request.