Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere

Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere (born 14 December 1970) is a Belgian civil engineer and promoter of ethical, reliable, and sustainable artificial intelligence (AI). In her public presentations and books, she focuses on a simple explanation of the concepts of AI and indicates which steps are required for a correct and ethical way of adopting this technology. She is an adjunct professor at Vlerick Business School and was appointed a Digital Mind by the Belgian federal government. In 2018, she was nominated as Belgium's ICT Woman of the Year.

Biography Early life and education Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere was born as a second child in Belgium in 1970. After obtaining a Master of Science in Engineering focused on Electromechanics at the KIHO Campus of KULeuven, she started a Master of Science in Engineering specializing in Engineering cybernetics at the University of Stuttgart. In 1995, she started a PhD in AI at the University of Auckland, investigating the use of AI in healthcare. A year later De Ketelaere decided to stop this research due to a misalignment between her academic beliefs and the medical world.

Career – early career to 2021 De Ketelaere began her professional career in New Zealand as a business analyst at QED Software. In 1999, she returned to Europe to support Silicon Valley start-ups seeking to establish European subsidiaries. She subsequently joined CrossWorlds Software, which was acquired by IBM in 2002. De Ketelaere then returned to Belgium, where, after a brief period at SAP, she spent five years at Microsoft in various roles.

In 2007, she joined SAS. During this period, De Ketelaere also worked as a guest lecturer at several business schools, including Vlerick Business School, ISDI and Nyenrode Business University.

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) approaching at the time, De Ketelaere emphasised the need for an ethical approach to data and analytics.

In 2018, De Ketelaere was nominated for ICT Woman of the Year by Trends. Based on her multidisciplinary focus on data and artificial intelligence, she was selected as an AI expert to contribute to the Belgian proposal for the AI community initiative AI4Belgium, under the leadership of Alexander De Croo. In May 2019, she accepted a position as Director of AI at imec.

Career – 2021 to present Following her tenure as AI Director at imec IDLab, De Ketelaere became an independent artificial intelligence adviser in 2021. The same year, she published her first book, "Wanted: Human AI Translators", in which she seeks to demystify the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and explain its role in society in accessible terms. The book is available in Dutch, French, and German.

In 2021, Vlerick appointed De Ketelaere as an adjunct professor of artificial intelligence. She was also appointed a "digital mind" by the federal cabinet of Mathieu Michel, then State Secretary for Digitalisation. From 2022 onwards, she continued her work independently as an adviser, lecturer and speaker on artificial intelligence.

De Ketelaere acts as an expert adviser to various companies and is regularly invited by the media for interviews, opinion pieces and as a keynote speaker. Her public work focuses, among other topics, on the conditions for trustworthy and sustainable artificial intelligence, the application of generative AI in organisations, and the societal risks associated with AI systems, particularly companion chatbots.

In 2024, she was named IT Person of the Year at the Belgian Computable Awards. In March 2026, her most recent book, The Chatbot Trap. The book addresses the societal risks associated with companion chatbots and was translated into Dutch and French.

Publications

External Link

Personal Website