The journey
I believed in this long before the world did.
I was eight when it began — though I had no words for it yet. My father, a CFO, would go to the office on weekends to deploy AS/400 systems, and I tagged along. I watched the terminals, the quiet discipline of machines that simply had to work because people and businesses depended on them. What I took from him wasn’t only a fascination with technology — it was resourcefulness: figuring things out, repairing, adapting, and never standing still, even when the path wasn’t obvious.
Very early, I felt computers were powerful but built the wrong way around. We had to type, click, search — to bend ourselves to the machine. I wanted the opposite: machines that understand us, starting with the most human interface we have — language. As a child, I was captivated by Ulysse 31, where the ship’s computer spoke with its crew. That talking machine planted a seed that never left me — and set me on the path to dialogue systems.
For close to seventeen years, that vision lived in the desert. People around me said it wouldn’t work — the technology wasn’t ready, the market wasn’t ready, the world wasn’t interested. I wasn’t waiting for AI to become fashionable. I kept building toward something I was certain had to exist.
Then came Angie — the assistant the press would call the “French Siri.” Minutes before going on, the Wi-Fi was collapsing, and every demo was live. Bernard Ourghanlian, my host on stage, called me up anyway. I asked the whole room to switch to airplane mode — “imagine you’re inside a giant 747” — and trusted the work. The first attempts stuttered. Then the connection came back, and Angie came alive: translating on command, hunting down the cheapest fuel nearby, and finally — unprompted — reminding me of a meeting at Bastille in thirty-five minutes. The room applauded. Years of quiet conviction, suddenly working live in front of everyone.
Watch the moment ↗
Since then I’ve had the privilege to work with governments, global companies, universities and scientific institutions — including NASA. But the deeper lesson came later. As AI grew more powerful, I saw the risk: built in the wrong direction, it could replace more than it augments, centralize intelligence instead of sharing it, make people more dependent instead of more capable.
Through all of it, I never left the keyboard. I could have retreated into pure strategy; I chose to keep building. I’m convinced you only truly understand AI by making it work under real constraints, with your own hands — and that’s exactly where my method comes from: not theory, but thousands of hours shipping systems that had to run in the real world. I’m an architect who still builds.
So my work today isn’t only about building AI systems — it’s about building them in the right direction: to help people think, learn, create and decide with more dignity. Not just experts. Not just executives. Not one country or one industry. Everyone.
The best technology isn’t the one that replaces us. It’s the one that helps more people become capable.
