Thierry Geerts

Thierry Geerts graduated from the VUB as a Solvay Business Engineer. He started his career as an auditor at PWC. After that, he was soon in charge of an industrial laundry company, Euroblan (now Rentokil). With the rise of the internet in the mid-1990s, he reoriented his career and started working in the media and held various management positions at the VUM (now Mediahuis), publisher of De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, among others. From 2011 to 2024 he headed Google in Belgium and Luxemburg, the company that is so much more than just a search engine.

He is also the author of two books: Digitalis (2018), in which he draws the outlines of a digital world, and Homo digitalis, about the impact of the digital revolution and AI on people and society. More than 50,000 copies have been sold for the benefit of the non-profit organisation BeCode.

For the past twenty years, he has also been a Business Angel and has assisted around twenty companies in various sectors and phases of development, including as co-founder of BeCentral, WinterCircus and Medi-Market.

He advised the Belgian government as a member of the Digital Minds for Belgium, the Walloon government in Le Conseil du Digital and recently the Flemish government as ambassador of Flanders Technology and Innovation. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Easyfairs and Sofindev. He was named Media Personality of the year in 2019 (AMMA).

He is a business developer and expert in digital transformation and AI, with a particular focus on sustainability and diversity.