Trefdag Vlaanderen Digitaal 2026 and the tension between AI and Service Design
Modern technology lets public organizations, amongst others, build solutions for citizens faster than ever before. Without proper service design, however, this speed only gets you to the wrong place quicker. On 22 October, we're taking the tension between AI and public service design to Trefdag Vlaanderen Digitaal, the annual event that brings together the people setting the direction for public services in Flanders. And we’re taking the stage too.
Building a working digital product is no longer the hard part
The limiting factor in public services used to be delivery, within a single mandate. Think budget cycles, technical capacity, integration with legacy systems nobody wanted to touch, … .
Contemporary technology, like artificial intelligence to name the elephant in the room, has changed that. AI has compressed concept development, prototyping and delivery to a point where building and delivering a working digital product isn’t the bottleneck anymore.
What's left is a harder question, and it's a leadership question rather than a technical one: what actually deserves to be built at all?
A technological accelerator is only worth having if it's pointed somewhere useful. If there's no clear view of the problem, AI won't supply one. It will just get you to the wrong answer sooner, and at scale.
Citizens don't want another portal. They want the task finished.
A paper form becoming a web form and a counter becoming a login are two easy to understand examples that often get referred to as being the fruits of successful transformations.
Yet, everything underneath stayed exactly as it was: the same steps, the same divisions between agencies, the same questions asking citizens for information the government already holds.
The question of what actually deserves to be built, is not answered by simply taking existing processes online.
The choice governmental leaders face today is whether to digitize the fragmented landscape or entirely redesign the process around the task.
A citizen arriving at a government service isn't looking for a cool interface. They're just trying to complete something. Registering an address, claiming an allowance or a privilege, understanding what they're owed and what they owe. Whether that task involves one governmental agency or seven is not a citizen’s concern, and it shouldn't be either.
Most public organizations know this. What makes it difficult is that the fragmentation is still real: many touchpoints, many legacy systems, many layers of government, each with its own logic. Hence, the choice governmental leaders face today is whether to digitize that fragmentation or entirely redesign the process around the task.
The first is faster. The second is what citizens actually experience as improvement.
Real transformation always starts with the latter one. Rethinking the task a citizen is trying to complete, how the service has to work to support that task, and how the organization has to be arranged behind it. That's a systemic exercise. It runs from the citizen's interaction all the way through to processes, roles, decisions, information and how teams work together internally. That's what keeps the complexity from becoming the citizen's problem.
Cheaper building raises the value of thinking
At Trefdag Digitaal Vlaanderen 2026, Sander takes the stage in the forum programme to unpack the relationship between service design and AI. A topic that sits at the heart of how we work at Craftzing.
As AI makes it easier and faster to build, that upfront thinking becomes more important, not less.
Rather than jumping straight to interfaces or technical builds, service design forces a more fundamental question first: what is actually broken, for whom, and why. It maps the full picture, from business processes, touchpoints, and role to interfaces, before a single line of code gets written. As AI makes it easier and faster to build, that upfront thinking becomes more important, not less.
That's the counterintuitive part, and it's where we take a clear position: cheaper building raises the value of thinking, it doesn't lower it. If organizations want to get the most out of AI over the next two years, speed is not what comes first. Knowing precisely what's worth building, is.
Join us at Trefdag 2026
The cost of redesigning a service around the citizen's task has never been lower, and the tools to do it have never been better. For public sector leaders, that turns a long-deferred ambition into something achievable inside a single mandate: services organized around what people are trying to do, rather than around how the institution happens to be structured.
Whether you're working on citizen-facing platforms, internal transformation, or figuring out where AI genuinely belongs in your service design process, come find us at Trefdag 2026 in our booth or catch Sander's talk.
Sander takes the stage in Hall 7, from 12:00 pm till 12:25 pm.
Don’t miss it.
By Sander Verhaeven