About us
Three people and a sixth seat at the table.
The Sixth Seat started with something you see in almost every boardroom. Every week decisions are made about margin, capacity, people and investments, and almost always on information that sits scattered, is out of date, or has been written up just a little too favorably. Not out of bad will, but because pulling that overview together costs more time than a leadership team has.
That is why we build the sixth seat: a digital colleague that follows along, does the math and thinks with you. It pulls figures from wherever they live, connects things that would otherwise only surface in the quarterly numbers, and asks the question nobody asks because everyone assumes someone else already did. It has no vote in the room. Deciding stays human work.
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René Savelberg
Management, leadership, culture and growth
René has more than thirty years of experience building, accelerating and course correcting organizations. As the former CEO of McDonald’s Netherlands he learned what it takes to keep hundreds of locations, thousands of employees and an entire chain of suppliers aligned, every single day. Not with a polished strategy on paper, but with agreements that work just as well in a kitchen at six in the morning as they do in the boardroom.
After that he built companies of his own, guided entrepreneurs through their growth phases and wrote about what makes growth stall in practice. It is rarely the market and almost never the idea. It is the things nobody writes down: unclear priorities, a leadership team that talks about numbers instead of choices, and decisions that keep hanging because one more piece of information is always missing.
At our table René guards the human side. A system changes nothing as long as people do not change their behavior. He looks at the meeting, at who owns what, at what a team genuinely dares to do in the first week. His experience shapes how we set up a pilot: start small, show something that works quickly, and only expand once the trust is there.
In every first conversation he asks the same question. Not which technology you want, but what has to go differently on Monday morning. If there is no answer to that, it is not a project yet.
Growth rarely fails on strategy. Growth fails on execution.
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Chris van Vleuten
Strategy and commercial translation
Chris turns possibilities into choices. That sounds simple, but it is exactly where most AI programs run aground. They start with what is technically possible, and only much later ask which decision gets better. Chris reverses that. He starts with the decision, works back to the information it needs, and only then asks which application delivers that fastest.
He separates what looks interesting from what demonstrably creates value. In practice that often means crossing things off. A dashboard nobody opens, a report nobody reads, a pilot mainly meant to show that you are doing something with AI: those are the projects that eat budget and change nothing. What is left is a handful of applications tied to a business case, with an amount and a time frame underneath.
In the 45-day pilot Chris guards the scope. Forty-five days is short enough to stay sharp and long enough to prove something, but only if nobody adds things along the way. He keeps the promise small and concrete, makes sure the executive team knows exactly what it gets on day 45, and then translates the outcome into the next step.
That is his role in the conversation with the rest of the organization too. He explains what the sixth seat does in language a commercial manager, a controller and a planner all recognize. Without buzzwords, because those only cost you trust.
If you cannot explain which decision gets better, it is not an application but an experiment.
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Martijn Maat
AI pioneer and innovator, technology and delivery
A lot of judgment about AI comes from people who never took it further than a chat window. I understand the skepticism, that comes with any new technology. But AI only gets interesting once it is connected to your systems, looking at your numbers and taking work off your hands. You can only judge something once you understand it, and understanding starts with doing.
I was already building agents and working applications for entrepreneurs when most companies were still mainly talking about it. Not in a demo environment, but where it is hardest: inside existing companies, with existing systems, existing habits and data that is rarely as tidy as it looks in a presentation.
My conviction goes against the common story. Not adopting AI is not cautious, it is more expensive. Put it off, and in two years you will be hiring people for work an agent could have done long ago. This is not about replacing people, it is about handling more with the same people. And about making work enjoyable again: once the repetitive part is gone, what is left is the work someone was hired for in the first place.
That is why I would rather build than buy tools. A stack of separate subscriptions makes you dependent on choices other people make. Every agent, every integration and every dashboard I build adds something to the same foundation. That foundation is yours, and it becomes more valuable with every step.
At The Sixth Seat I am responsible for product development and for everything that actually has to run. I would rather build something small that works today than something big that might be finished six months from now. And I guard three things: that company information stays secure, that an application is understandable to more than the person who built it, and that an agent fits the rhythm of the team.
“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.”Leonardo da Vinci
Our principles
Six commitments we keep in every project.
- Start with the business and with decisions, not with the technology.
- Tie every serious application to a business case and to measurable indicators.
- Let the sixth seat do the preparation. People keep making the decisions.
- Start small, prove it fast, and scale up only in a controlled way.
- Do not build scattered initiatives, but one coherent digital foundation.
- Keep sources, analyses, and human review traceable.