Leslie Cottenje

Leslie Cottenjé's public thinking centers on one conviction that hardens over time: technology is only as good as the trust it earns, especially when the stakes are irreversible. Speaking about her year leading assessmentQ within Televic, she frames the whole enterprise in stark terms, describing "Digital Exams that cannot go wrong, at all!" [1] and returning to that same line when she addresses conference audiences: exams that "impact lives and cannot go wrong, at all" [4][5]. This is not incidental phrasing repeated for effect, it is the organizing idea behind everything else she says about her work.

Her account of joining Televic doubles as a small case study in adjusting her own instincts. She describes the move as "joining a global leadership network, spanning the four business units at Televic," which she says is "expanding my can-do and dream bigger mindset" [1]. At the same time, she is candid that the company's orientation required a shift on her part: "It's mostly long term vision, and this company really also acts like it. Sometimes it requires adjusting on my part too, coming from growth at all cost" [1]. That contrast, between a background steeped in rapid SaaS growth and a company built for the long term, recurs as a genuine tension she is working through rather than a lesson already learned. There is also a personal register to the move that she doesn't separate from the professional one, noting the HQ sits in "West-Flanders, my roots" and remarking on "having discussions in meeting rooms in West-Flemish probably for the first time in my career" [1].

On the question of artificial intelligence, she holds a consistent, cautious-but-not-dismissive position. She is direct that innovation for its own sake is not the goal: "It's not tech for the sake of tech, it's really exploring the ethics and the simple que[stions]" [1]. That same balance shows up in her account of the eAA 2026 conference, where discussion ranged over "how to use AI to improve productivity and solve scale issues in exam creation, grading, vigilance, analysis" while "at the same time staying on the ethical side of things" [5]. She treats AI as a real lever for solving scale problems in assessment, but only within a framework that keeps ethics and integrity as non-negotiable constraints, not afterthoughts.

The clearest articulation of her thinking is what she calls the Trust System, presented for the first time at the eAA conference. Her framing is explicit about what she is and isn't claiming to build: "Technology is the foundation, but what we really are building is Trust" [4]. She structures this into three interlocking layers, "infrastructure, integrity and people," and locates the actual point of failure precisely at their seams, noting "it specifically is in the alignment that it often goes wrong" [4]. This is a practitioner's model, drawn from what she says she has "seen go wrong" and "learnt to go right" over a year in the e-assessment space layered on top of "years of SaaS and customer experience" [4]. She is careful to position the framework as additive to an already knowledgeable audience rather than a rehash, which signals how deliberately she thinks about what she is contributing versus what is already known in the field.

Her comments on the National Examinations Roundtable extend the same logic outward from her own company to the whole ecosystem of exam delivery. She describes convening "governments, awarding bodies and technology providers to discuss the challenges in organising National Exams at scale" [5], and singles out one conclusion as foundational above the rest: that doing this "right, secure and avoiding failure" requires working together across those groups [5]. This collaborative framing, that no single actor, technology vendor included, can secure trust in assessment alone, is consistent with her Trust System's emphasis on alignment rather than any single layer being sufficient on its own.

Read across the full span of the material, from the entrepreneurial optimism captured in the 2016 Connexi clip, where she recalls drawing "heel veel inspiratie" from ambitious peers full of ideas and dreams [6], to the considerably more structured and stakes-aware language of 2026, there is a clear thro