Chris Parker: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I have talked with Maarten Mantje from The Only Constant with the backdrop of taste-testing his gin, Stookers Gin, which he created the recipe for with AI a number of years ago. He also tasted some sloe gin that I make at home. So, we’ve been drinking through this conversation, but the essence of this has been around the impact of AI on organizations, how to adopt AI in organizations, and what that means about knowing yourself and knowing the possibilities of technology. While we had fun with gin, we also got deep into what AI is really doing in our lives and in businesses. So Maarten, why would this be valuable? What insights would they get if they listen to this episode?

Maarten Mantje: In essence, the thing we talked about most, and what I think you will get out of it, is to go out, dream big, and start building small things. You will find that both are actually quite possible. So dream big, start building, and you will see that new things will happen.

Chris Parker: Welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. I’m having a conversation and I’m going to be drinking some booze with Maarten Mantje, who is a founder of The Only Constant. We’ll get into what The Only Constant is about regarding his innovation, digital change, and advisory practice here in the Netherlands. He has created, with some fellow co-founders, a gin brand called Stookers. As we’ve been working together in the strategy and adoption subgroup of the Gen AI Circle, he mentioned in passing that he used AI to create gin. Before we pour some gin, Maarten, thank you for joining. Can you share a little bit about your story, where The Only Constant came from, and how that brought you into the world of gin?

Maarten Mantje: Well, first, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk about transformation, AI, and particularly about booze. One small thing for the Stookers: Stookers has two O’s rather than one, which you would expect in Dutch.

Going way back, I have a master’s degree in management and organization, which I did nothing with for 25 years. I went into working for digital agencies and had a startup. Working in digital agencies and in advertising mostly as a strategic planner, one of the frustrations I always had is that as a planner, you always need other people to do stuff. I can think, I can write, I can create beautiful decks, and then hope for the best. Then this thing, generative AI, came along and it showed me that I could make more than I expected. I had a similar experience with 3D printing before that—the idea that you can create physical stuff.

The gin basically came from the same ambition. We were three friends on a terrace in Austria. The tonic ran out and the gin was disgusting. One of the friends, who is a chemist, said, “I can do better.” I said let’s make that into a product. Finding the right flavor and recipe was a challenge, but getting it into a store legally was way more time-consuming.

We didn’t start out with an AI recipe. The first two flavors, which are still available, are based on tea—Organic Green and Organic Black. But then, my chemist friend is not the one to talk to about flavor. I was curious: what does spring taste like? Or what does Amsterdam taste like? There was this ambition to have a different way of talking about flavor. About two and a half years ago, using a predecessor to Perplexity, I figured let’s see if I can make a distiller recipe for a gin that tastes like the Dutch Summer.

Before I knew it, I was in a conversation with this machine about what a gin recipe is and what a Dutch Summer tastes like. The distilling of gin is kind of a violent and aggressive process. There are a lot of flavors that don’t survive the distilling process. I found myself in a conversation with this machine, and it understood that process; it knew some flavors would be more dominant after distilling than others. After a couple of hours, I had a recipe. The flavor profile, the way the ingredients matched together, was super interesting.

We spent the weekend distilling a very small batch. It turned out to be surprisingly good. We experimented a bit more, only with the amounts of the ingredients, and something really interesting came out. It’s one of the few gins I actually like straight. Through a former colleague, I got in touch with the global master distiller of one of the biggest gin brands in the world. I sent her a bottle, and she sent a message back that she really liked it.

It’s been on the market for a bit over a year and a half now. It was one of the first gins in which the recipe was created by an AI. The thing I found most magical about it is that two guys and a machine can actually create something which is liked by the one defending the flavor of the biggest gin brand in the world. The game changed.

Chris Parker: What I loved about it is that you started with an abstract, very human concept—you wanted something that tastes like Dutch Summer. With the decisions you made with the quantities, was that a bit heretical? Did you break some longstanding industry views?

Maarten Mantje: Yeah. The main thing that makes it Dutch, according to the machine, is strawberry and mint. So, it’s a soft and gentle strawberry-minty gin. The problem with strawberry is you need large quantities to have the flavor in there after distillation. If this had to be a commercially viable product where we needed to live from the revenues, we would never have made it like this because the margins are super thin.

Chris Parker: I have Dutch Summer here in front of me. I’m going to start cracking it. You advised I can just drink it straight?

Maarten Mantje: Straight in. Not too cold, because then you will lose the flavor.

Chris Parker: It just screams freshness to me. It’s not overwhelming. Sort of citrusy to me. I’m not picking up any strawberry going on for me at this moment.

Maarten Mantje: No, wait for it.

Chris Parker: Whoa. That does not hit like gin. It is very soft until it’s not. It hits the palate and then it kind of explodes through your nasal cavity.

Maarten Mantje: Yeah. There are these Chinese flowers that are edible; you put them on your tongue and after a while, it just goes whoosh and grows into this really citrusy flavor.

Chris Parker: That’s the sensation I just had. I took the taste and I was like, well, it’s hardly even alcohol, then it just kind of flowed over the tongue and then… whoa. Really nice.

Maarten Mantje: It is drinkable without tonic. Many variations of hard liquor have this feeling that you feel it going down. That’s not so much here. So, it’s super dangerous.

Chris Parker: My story with gin, which is also why my ears perked up, is actually sloe gin. Sloe gin is let’s call it an infusion. It uses the blackthorn berry, the sloe berry. The traditional recipe is just gin—usually the worst tasting, cheapest gin you can find because you’re not going to taste the gin—berries, and sugar. What I do is a little bit perverse; I like a little bit of flavor, so I put a couple of cloves and a little chunk of a cinnamon stick in there. I have a bottle here.

Maarten Mantje: Can I open it?

Chris Parker: You may open it. It survived an accident, so it should be good. No AI involved.

Maarten Mantje: It’s nice and thick. The clove is there for sure. It’s nice. Very sweet. Dangerous.

Chris Parker: This is like half gin, half berry.

Maarten Mantje: I really like the clove in it. I think otherwise it would be less interesting. It’s very wintry. So basically, with the Dutch Summer and this, we cover the whole year.

Chris Parker: Let’s dive past the booze. You mentioned that two guys and a machine were able to make something of a unique quality. For me, the biggest opportunity—and threat—is two guys in a machine doing something that a legacy organization is unable to even think about. It’s democratizing creation. How are you helping organizations with that via The Only Constant?

Maarten Mantje: The thing we did is basically cheating. There’s nothing new, it’s just faster. We were able to skip a lot of steps because we had access to a machine. The things that were most important in the creation of this recipe were knowing what we wanted and deciding whether we found it or not—briefing and reviewing. I use Stookers as my marketing lab for The Only Constant. Everything I can’t sell, or if I need a market, we just create it in Stookers.

About two years ago, we created a fully autonomous social media department. It’s still live at @stookers on Instagram. It posts seven times a week. We created a social media agency with a boss, a strategy planner, a researcher, copy agent, design agent, PR, and project manager. By automating the department, it taught me that if I automate the whole department, I can learn what I definitely should do and what I definitely should not leave to the machines.

Optimizing oneself or a task within your own job will just make a faster you. We need a way to get people to talk about possibilities. We created a set of cards that allows you to talk about what the machine could do in a certain phase of a process. If you take away hurdles and look at things from a systems theory perspective, you can redesign in a new way.

At The Only Constant, we have three big domains: Ideate, Automate, and Innovate. Ideate is understanding what is possible. Automate is making myself a bit more efficient. Innovate is creating stuff that couldn’t be done before.

Chris Parker: I have a copy of your cards. One I called out is “AI predicts future outcomes.” There are others like “AI converts data formats” and “AI reviews guidelines and standards.” In my experience, people are paralyzed because they don’t know what they do now; they’re constrained by systems. It’s a maturity process of understanding self.

Maarten Mantje: The most fascinating thing is that conversations become active. People stand around the table with these tangible cards, move stuff around, and the thinking will be different. It’s strictly about getting a better understanding of what is possible.

Chris Parker: We are both members of the Gen AI Circle, specifically the strategy and adoption subgroup, and we are working on a playbook. How do you see a collectively written playbook supporting that mission?

Maarten Mantje: I think the thing we try to achieve is that it shows you a way to get to a desired end state. LinkedIn is full of white papers that are super high level but not practical. Or they focus only on the technical process—like “use my prompt to make this video”—without taking into account whether that fits your brand.

We try to help people understand how you could get from random “let’s do stuff” to something more sustainable. We explain why so many AI initiatives fail—often because you haven’t clearly defined the starting point and the end state. I’m proud that it is written in a way that you can imagine people reading it on a Sunday afternoon while drinking their sloe gin or Stookers.

Chris Parker: I was impressed that when we presented this eight-stage framework, it created active conversations. We gave labels to concepts like “Discover Potential” before “Design Solution.” And “Activate,” which is running the proof of value before you scale it. You can condense what used to be a two-year program into a week now on disposable tech to prove it works.

I want to mention the Stookers Instagram again. It’s a bit quirky. There are a few things that are abstract, and every fourth one is just a bottle with a background.

Maarten Mantje: I’ve seen worse! The reason it’s still acceptable is that we were quite strict on defining what it should be. If I tell the model not to put bottles in there, it gives me more bottles. Branding was a problem. But the thing I wanted to prove is that using AI for tasks is only sensible if you have a very clear understanding of what right or wrong output is. If you can’t explain to the model what is right, you will get guesses.

Chris Parker: This is the first episode of 2026. Any last tip or thought on what’s happening this year with Gen AI?

Maarten Mantje: Two things. First, if you want to understand what this technology can do for you, you need to understand how it will destroy your business. If you truly understand that, then you can think about what you should be.

Second, I enjoy the posts of Ethan Mollick. He asks the weirdest questions to AI imaginable. If you want to understand what can be done, be the seven-year-old kid again and ask weird questions. Ask it to make stuff. Asking “Can you help me make a recipe that tastes like Dutch Summer?” made no sense to ask a computer two years ago, but suddenly it was meaningful.

Chris Parker: I love it. Maarten Mantje from theonlyconstant.nl and stookers.nl (that’s with two O’s). Leaving with these points: understand the risk to your business—how will this destroy my business—and have this playful, creative curiosity. Go build with it so you understand yourself more, your company more, and the possibilities more. Happy New Year everyone.

Maarten Mantje: Make more stuff.

Chris Parker: Thank you for listening.