Overview
5th floor is a Belgian B Corp-certified digital company of 120+ professionals that delivers tailor-made digital solutions designed to transform public sector organisations. The company offers tailor-made software, UX research and design, data and business intelligence services, agile coaching, and legacy system modernization (L4F).
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In the news
- How much time does your team spend each week looking for information that already exists somewhere? Decades of document management and enterprise search later, most teams still struggle to find the right page. 👉 Part of the problem, as Michael Bebronne, 5th floor, points out: documentation follows the way it was written, while readers show up with a question. #AI changes the way in. The right solution lets your team ask in plain language instead of digging through folders, and read the business rule rather than four hundred
- Only 22% of organisations have scaled AI beyond one business unit and 11% don't know what their function spent on AI last year. We find the second number more worrying than the first. #AI projects deliver something in plenty of places. Very few organisations can say what, and a result you can't measure is hard to defend in the next budget round. In the public sector, that question may well arrive before any regulator does. #Belgium still hasn't designated its AI market surveillance authority, so nobody is going to hand you a
- Two questions worth asking before anyone touches a critical application with AI. Who owns the code that comes out? Where does the source code sit while the project runs? At 5th floor, both answers are written into the first proposal, before any work starts. The resulting code is yours. Then comes the question of who decides. The AI reads the existing code and drafts the rules it finds. Your analysts check and correct them, and your teams validate the resulting behaviour against what's expected. The architecture of the new
- AI-generated #code compiles more than 95% of the time. It passes security tests about 55% of the time. Two years of new models and that second figure has barely changed. So the next release won't fix it. Your own project guidelines and static analysis will, with human review focused on the risky parts of the code. Review is also where teams are now stuck. Code arrives faster than before, and the number of people able to review it hasn't grown. If your velocity goes up while change failure rate and recovery time get worse, you've
- Every generation of tools promised to fix documentation. Most organisations still can't find the right page when it matters. Michael Bebronne, 5th floor, sees 5️⃣ causes that haven't moved: - whoever writes the doc is rarely the one who needs it - a failing test sets off an alarm, a stale page doesn't - once people stop trusting the docs, they stop maintaining them - clean processes on paper don't prevent the problem - auditing an existing corpus by hand quickly becomes unmanageable #AI helps with two of these: the time it all
- More than 80% of Belgian organisations let their staff use AI tools. Only 29% have a written #AIpolicy. Meanwhile, the EU has pushed the #AI Act's high-risk obligations back to 2 December 2027. The reaction we keep hearing: we have time! At 5th floor, we don't think so. The transparency rules of Article 50 have and the real gap isn't legal. It sits in a very ordinary moment, a Tuesday at 2 p.m., when someone pastes an internal document into whatever tool happens to be open. A policy sets principles. It doesn't decide which model
- When did you last leave a meeting glad you'd gone? In the latest episode of the Public Service Adventure podcast, our co-founder Evert Penninckx sits down with facilitation expert Charles-Louis de Maere to unpack why so many meetings go nowhere, and what it takes to fix them. 💡 What we took away: → Collective intelligence is not a headcount. More people in the room rarely means better decisions. → Breakout groups work better than going round the table. → The debrief is where people connect the dots. Skip it and the decision
- 98% of applications migrated. 0 minutes of downtime in production. Automatic rollback on every deployment. These aren’t just targets. They are the results achieved by a major Belgian federal institution following the #modernisation of its deployment pipeline, carried out in collaboration with 5th floor. The starting point was similar to that of many public sector organisations: - developers and a production team who did not communicate sufficiently, - manual deployments, - an ageing JBoss infrastructure, - no guarantee that what
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