Complex products don't sell themselves. Someone has to translate them.
I write about industrial AI, visualization, and the South Africa ↔ Europe deal flow that joins them. Nine years inside enterprise e-commerce, AI operations and renewables, now building the layer those industries kept saying was missing.
Lens: reading the buyer before the buyer reads you.
A weekend tool I built because I was tired of walking into industrial sales meetings half blind. 208 European accounts catalogued, 25 active dossiers, 183 dormant. ⓐ the most valuable output is not the summary, it is the voice DNA, ⓑ team structure predicts deal structure more than most operators realize, and ⓒ a dormant catalogue beats one-by-one preparation. Where Lens ends and Cloudly begins.
One essay. Every other Tuesday.
On industrial AI, visualization, and ZA↔EU deal-making. Free.
Cloudly Studio
An AI-led industrial visualization studio in Warsaw. Generative imagery and 3D renders for manufacturers, energy companies and global e-commerce brands across four tracks: Industrial Pipeline, Fashion Render Agency, a Fashion App (SaaS) and Tech for Industries.
Braystone Consulting
A South Africa ↔ Europe advisory firm with attorney Freddie Terblanche (Legal Director). Energy, industrial technology, and AI-enablement of mid-market companies, on both buy-side and sell-side of M&A. Cape Town & Warsaw.
unComplex Podcast
A long-form business podcast co-hosted with Swiss strategist Lionel Pastor. Conversations with the operators actually doing the work, nearshoring founders, modern-agency owners, energy executives, AI builders. No hype.
Trained in marketing the kind of products nobody can explain in one sentence.
I'm Adriaan, South-African by birth, Warsaw-based since 2011. I started my career as a lawyer and practiced for several years in South Africa before moving to Warsaw, where I ran an art gallery for several years and then crossed into marketing and tech. The marketing chapter starts in 2017, when I joined eStoreBrands as Communications & Marketing Manager. Over five years there I helped position a Polish e-commerce intelligence platform into BSH, Whirlpool, Philips, Danone, Galderma, Wella, De'Longhi and the rest of European FMCG procurement, and wrote 200+ trade pieces in the process.
From 2022 to 2025 I served as Chief Marketing Officer across two Polish technology companies: Pragmile, a custom-AI software house, and Solar Spy, a startup applying AI to solar-PV fault diagnostics. Those three years taught me the part of "AI for industry" that doesn't appear in keynotes: how an operations director at a 200-MW solar farm decides whether to trust a model.
In 2025 I stopped working for other people's category creation and started my own. Cloudly Studio is the visualization layer I kept wishing those previous companies had had. Braystone Consulting is the cross-border advisory my SA → EU career arc was always going to become. unComplex is the conversation I wanted to be having anyway, with Lionel Pastor.
Education LLM, North-West University, 2007, cross-border environmental law.
Civic Co-founder, Learn For The Future (NGO, 2016 →). Founding member, Swiss Community Poland.
with a model
in the loop.
Three small AI experiments, built on weekends, that I now quietly run my own work on.
Reach / outreach OS
PrivateA weekend project that turned into the way I run my own outreach. Claude in the loop, LinkedIn Sales Navigator on one side, Hunter.io on the other. Three channels stacked on top: LinkedIn, email, and a PDF that gets printed and put on a desk by a mailing partner. Not a product I sell, just a thing I built because I wanted to see how far one curious operator could push the end-to-end without a sales team.
Lens / account intelligence
PrivateThis one started as a question: can a model read every public surface a company has and tell me, honestly, what I am about to walk into? Lens reads the website, the press, the socials, scores the sentiment and engagement, maps the team's shape and capacity. Then it drafts a first cut of a pitch deck, one company at a time. I still rewrite most of it. The first draft just saves me four hours and stops me showing up uninformed.
Council / virtual C-suite
Private, powered by ClaudeThe one I keep going back to. A private workspace powered by Claude, hosting a simulated executive team I built for my own use: a CEO who pushes ambition, a CFO who pushes back, a CMO, a CBDO, a system architect, two engineers. Every Friday I write the week's reflection and push it in with the new data. Monday morning, the board has read it and the discussion starts. Not a product. A thinking partner, and the highest-quality strategy meeting in my week.
adriaan@lens $ lens brief "target company, motor insurance account" ✓ reading site, press, socials, news ✓ team shape mapped · sentiment scored · gaps flagged → drafting first-cut deck, visual language matched [ok] brief ready · I still rewrite most of it · just saves four hours
Also on the bench. A personal agent toolchain, gstack, that wraps the build loop above into one command line.
Long-form, with the operators.
Tell me what you're trying to translate.
I read every message that arrives at my personal inbox. I reply within 48 hours on a working week, slower if I'm in Cape Town.
For commercial work (Cloudly, Braystone, or guesting on unComplex), please use the routing on the right, it lands with the right team faster.
adriaan@adriaanvandenberg.com