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Inside ZhuLiAI

We're a small AI engineering studio based in Zaltbommel. We've been building AI agents since 2022 — before the term became a marketing phrase — and we're careful about what we take on.

What we do and how we think about it

ZhuLiAI B.V. was founded in 2022 by a team with backgrounds in software engineering and operations consulting. The original question was simple: why are businesses spending so much time on structured, repeatable work that a well-designed system could handle?

The answer, it turned out, was that most "automation" tools required either heavy configuration or constant maintenance — or both. They were sold as plug-and-play but required an engineer to babysit them. We started building differently: by mapping the real process first, designing the agent logic second, and only writing code once the logic had been reviewed and signed off.

We're not a platform company. We don't resell software licenses or wrap existing chatbot builders with a new interface. Each agent we build is a custom piece of software designed around a specific workflow. That's slower and more expensive per project than buying a SaaS subscription — and for the right use case, it works substantially better.

We keep the team small deliberately. At three to five people, we can be fully across every active engagement. We turn down projects when we're at capacity, and we don't start building before we're confident the scope is right.

We're based on the Waalkade in Zaltbommel. We work primarily with companies in the Netherlands and broader EU, though the nature of this work means we often collaborate with clients entirely remotely.

Who writes and builds here

LH

Lena van der Hoeven

AI Systems Engineer

Lena spent six years building backend systems for logistics companies in the Netherlands before moving into AI engineering in 2021. Her work at ZhuLiAI focuses on agent architecture, integration design, and making sure the logic that gets built matches what was agreed in the scoping process.

She writes about agent design, process mapping, and why most automation fails at the integration step. Topics covered: support automation, ops agents, failure modes.

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DS

Diederik Smit

Operations & Implementation Lead

Diederik worked as an operations consultant for eight years, primarily in the professional services and managed services sectors in the Netherlands and Belgium. At ZhuLiAI he leads client engagements — process mapping, deployment planning, and the handover to client teams.

He writes about the operational side of deploying agents: what changes in the team workflow, where monitoring matters, and how to handle the edge cases that turn up after go-live. Topics covered: ops workflow, deployment, client handover.

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