Jan Scholtes has worked on AI since 1985, moving from a lieutenant role in Dutch Navy intelligence to building ZyLAB, a company known for searching messy documents in hundreds of languages, and he later set up a university chair to train the specialists his own company needed. He now looks at legal and diligence problems mainly as sorting and search challenges rather than pure generative AI problems, insists on explainable systems over black-box AI, and applies that same lens to fields like eDiscovery, privacy, and M&A data-room review, where he pushes for searchable data and faster, AI-assisted risk checks.