About AIssential

Who's Behind It

He started in 3D animation, on the feature film Kaena: The Prophecy, then on series. There he designed, built and kept evolving production pipelines, with the director, the heads of department and the producers. A production brings together hundreds of people and up to eight trades, for months and sometimes years. It produces very large volumes of very varied data, and each trade depends on the work of the others. A mistake there costs dearly: it can pull dozens of people back onto the job for weeks. He later joined a studio where he led up to twelve people, including AI engineers, and his programme won support from the CNC, the French national film centre.

His PhD at Inria starts from a simple observation. An engineer describes a problem very well piece by piece, with the rules of the trade, but the tools that solve hard problems make them restate everything in one block. So he designed a language in which engineers write their know-how the way they think it, and the machine finds the solution. The work was tested in the logistics industry, in the European Net-WMS project, on loading goods under the rules of each warehouse. He was already putting a trade's know-how into software.

At Imaginatio, he led R&D and then operations for a young innovative company offering an augmented legal word processor. While a lawyer reads or writes, the cited texts appear in the margin, in the version in force. The method is patented.

At the ICIJ, the consortium of journalists behind the Panama Papers, he was head of innovation. He developed the first version of DataShare, which lets journalists search their documents without handing them to anyone, and cross-check them with those of their peers inside a confidential virtual network. The project is a laureate of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation (Stanford / Columbia), and the paper describing its networked version was distinguished by the CNIL-Inria privacy prize jury in 2021.

The thread never changed. We understand the whole trade, with everyone who takes part in it, before putting software into it. We then build a tool that holds in production, because the people who use it have no time to fix it. Software takes the what follows a rule, and the matters of judgment stay with the trade. That is what we do in your business, one piece of work at a time: AI where it pays off, your expertise where it counts most.

What We Know How to Do

• Writing down a trade's know-how. His PhD designed a language in which engineers write their know-how the way they think it, and the machine finds the solution. It was put to the test on loading goods in warehouses.
• Tools for experts. At Imaginatio, a legal word processor that shows the cited texts in the margin, in the version in force. The method is patented, and the company won the DILA Open Law prize.
• Artificial intelligence. An AI specialist for twenty years, he has led AI engineers. He knows how to choose an AI tool and judge it on your files, not on its demo. We know what each method can do and what it misses: where AI pays off, and where a plain calculation is enough.
• Decision support. Scheduling, allocating cases, choosing under constraints: a part of the work that calculation solves without resorting to AI.
• Software architecture. Production pipelines that hundreds of people and up to eight trades depend on, for years, where a mistake costs dearly.
• Security and confidentiality. DataShare lets ICIJ journalists search their documents without handing them to anyone. Its networked version was distinguished by the CNIL-Inria privacy prize jury.
• Operations management. He ran R&D and then operations at Imaginatio, and led up to twelve people in a studio. That is how we leave you a way of working that runs without us.

Counsel — our self-serve decision aid

Counsel is the software side of the same method, and you can use it without talking to us. Weighing a specific AI decision? Counsel argues a position on your call, with every claim quoted from a real source — never generated. 14 days free, no card; then €99/mo Solo for every decision you bring.

We publish public verdicts on the calls leadership teams are weighing now, so you can see exactly what Counsel produces before you get in touch.