On Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, Jana Wilhelmus encountered a familiar face on a billboard: her own. More than a decade earlier, she had been a young Bulgarian newcomer trying to find her way through the city. Now she was standing beside her fellow AI4ALL founder Alla Idrisova, looking at a campaign that put their work in public view. Her family got to see it too. For someone whose profession involves helping other people get noticed, appearing on the advertising was a pleasing reversal.
The Equals Role Model Campaign of 2026 featured Wilhelmus and Idrisova together. Their colleagues Oliviana Bailey and Karen Harriss also appeared as a pair. Four founders, two portraits, one fairly practical proposition: people should be able to see themselves participating in technology’s future. Wilhelmus understood the personal significance of that proposition. She had spent years building a career across countries, businesses and different versions of working life. Here was a moment when those pieces occupied the same frame.
A career with several front doors
Wilhelmus attended the American University in Bulgaria from 2002 to 2006. Her activities included the university’s theatre academy and the presidency of its photography club. Before the campaigns and the workshops, there were already pictures, performance and the business of getting people to pay attention. A university activity list cannot explain a whole career, but this one offers a rather appropriate opening credit.
Her public professional profile places her in the Rotterdam and The Hague area. It also contains recommendations from people who have worked with her in marketing and mentoring. Johan Kersten describes collaborating with her on the marketing strategy and digital platform for Sylvius Gin, recalling her ability to move between planning and delivery. Iliyana Grudeva remembers Wilhelmus as a mentor through Mentor the Young. These are different kinds of working relationship: building a brand with one person, helping another develop her own direction.
Wilhelmus’s own account of her career includes corporate work, international campaigns, an e-commerce venture and a content studio. Parenthood brought career breaks. Community building became a recurring occupation. The list resists the usual professional biography, in which each job politely prepares the reader for the next. Hers has more entrances and exits. Looking back, she identifies service as the continuity: “I love serving people.” The job titles changed; the interest in helping people find a place persisted.
Fourteen countries, and a friendship that became a business
In June 2022, United Partners announced a Dutch sister company focused on consumer brands, with Wilhelmus as managing partner. The brief covered strategy, celebrity partnerships, international public relations and marketing to both businesses and consumers. By then, the agency described her as having more than fifteen years of international marketing experience. This was work conducted across markets, with the complications that arrive when a campaign has to travel further than its creators do.
One recent project involved arranging partnerships with Adrien Brody and Milla Jovovich and developing the public relations strategy for Johnnie Walker’s The Walkers campaign, launched in fourteen countries. Famous faces make a campaign easy to describe. The less glamorous nouns in that job description - partnerships, markets, strategy - tell us more about the work behind it.
The business relationship had a history of its own. Wilhelmus and United Partners founder Maria Gergova had worked together more than fifteen years earlier. A client-agency relationship became a friendship, then a new venture. In a career full of changes, an old connection supplied the next opening. Sometimes the useful contact really is someone you already know.
The launch footprint of The Walkers campaign, for which Wilhelmus helped arrange celebrity partnerships and develop PR strategy.
Making a complicated subject approachable
Her communications work also intersected with environmental questions. United Partners supported The Future of Business, an information platform launched in April 2023 through an initiative connected to WWF and VELUX. The platform brought together articles, video and podcasts about sustainable business in Central and Eastern Europe. Its subjects ranged from finance to forests, water and food systems.
Wilhelmus publicly represented the agency’s support for that collaboration. The assignment involved helping an initiative gain attention and giving business audiences ways into a complicated topic. That is a useful piece of context for her later AI work. A public information platform depends on the quality of its explanations as well as the importance of its subject. A visitor still needs a reason to open the article, stay with the discussion or pass it to a colleague.
By March 2024, Wilhelmus was taking that communications experience into a European conversation about AI skills. At the Inclusive AI & Skills Conference in Brussels, she was listed as head of marketing for Women in AI in the Netherlands, managing partner at United Partners and co-founder of âMEpreneurship. She moderated a session on national initiatives to expand women’s participation in AI. Her place on the programme joined consumer marketing to public participation in technology, with several professional identities printed beneath the same name.
The founding menu: cold pizza, warm wine
AI4ALL was founded in the Netherlands in 2024. Its origin account has four expat women meeting after hours in empty offices, with cold pizza and warm wine. The catering was modest. The question was substantial: how could people outside technology’s established circles have a say in the development of AI? Their backgrounds included marketing, IT, entrepreneurship and community building. They began by learning together, then invited others in.
Wilhelmus co-founded the organisation with Bailey, Harriss and Idrisova. Today its team page gives her the titles of Co-CEO and Head of Strategy. The leadership is shared, and the wider team includes people responsible for mentoring, youth programmes, digital work, events and entrepreneurial support. The organisation calls itself a do-tank, a name that commits it to a certain amount of doing.
Its published figures give that activity some scale: more than 2,000 community members across the Netherlands and Europe, and more than eighty volunteers. It reports teaching practical AI skills to more than 365 people through five programmes during its first year. Those are the organisation’s own counts. Behind each count is the ordinary work of making a programme happen: a suitable room, someone to teach, and people willing to arrive with questions.
- 2022United Partners Consumer
Managing partner - 2024Brussels AI skills conference
AI4ALL founded - 2026Equals role-model campaign
Practical AI marketing workshops
The room earns its keep
Wilhelmus has described sitting at her laptop with twenty tabs open: work, tools, grant applications and unanswered messages. It is an unceremonious picture of entrepreneurship, and a recognisable one. The open browser has become an excellent place to store everything except a sense of completion. Her response was to learn with other people, experimenting with prompts, asking questions and laughing when the output deserved it.
That approach informed her invitation to an AI fundamentals and prompting session. She described a place to practise together, with the possibility of wine and pizza. Food keeps reappearing in AI4ALL’s story, perhaps because learning is easier to sustain when the evening has something else going for it. The attraction is also immediate help. Someone can look at the task in front of you, understand the problem and offer a next step.
After the September 2026 marketing workshop she led with Bailey in Amsterdam, AI4ALL described what participants had built. A shared starting prompt gathered a brand’s positioning, audience, tone, colours and typography. Participants then carried that information into practical work, including branded visuals in Canva and experiments with video. The exercise asks participants to articulate information a marketer would need anyway: who they are speaking to, how they want to sound and what the business represents. These are modest, inspectable outputs. A small business owner can open the result the next morning and decide whether it belongs in the business.
A dinner with consequences
On 6 February 2026, AI4ALL’s gala brought 130 leaders, enthusiasts and curious participants to ING’s Cedar Building in Amsterdam. Wilhelmus joined Lucia Loyo in presenting the AI4Her Future award to Liana Hakobyan, founder of The AI Habit. Recognition was part of the evening’s purpose; fundraising and making connections were part of it too.
The dinner also featured magician Michel van Zeist, who produced an apparently endless length of tape from his mouth and sent it across the dining area. It supplied an unusually literal image for an organisation interested in connecting people. More usefully, the gala assembled potential supporters in the same room as the work they might support. Wilhelmus had promoted sponsorships, award categories and corporate tables beforehand. The strategy role includes finding ways to pay for the invitation.
Who keeps the final say?
In August 2026, Wilhelmus explained how she uses Claude across her work. It helps with files, content calendars and the search for potential partners. She keeps responsibility for strategy and decisions involving values. Her formulation is concise: “AI suggests. It doesn’t decide.” The allocation matters when an organisation is choosing whom to work with, as much as when a marketer is choosing what to publish.
“AI suggests. It doesn’t decide.”
Jana Wilhelmus
That leaves a person with plenty to do. It also leaves room for the ambition running through her public story: helping people acquire the confidence and company to participate. The woman on the Amsterdam billboard had built brands, started ventures and found collaborators. Now she was helping others enter an unfamiliar field. The next useful encounter might happen under a campaign poster. It might happen over a laptop, with a question someone has finally felt comfortable asking.