About

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Karim Louedec spent twenty years in data, ten of them as Chief Data & AI Officer, at Maisons du Monde, then at Servier, and more recently at Limagrain.

The work consisted of building data and AI functions where none yet existed. Recruiting teams that had no precedent in the house, obtaining budget arbitrations against better-established priorities, defending them before committees that had no particular reason to believe in them, and answering two years later for what had been promised. In one of those groups, the function went from two people to a hundred and fifty, the share of data in the IT budget changed order of magnitude, and a cloud partnership was negotiated under the constraints of a heavily regulated sector.

These roles teach something the organisation charts do not show. Most of the decisions that commit an expert organisation are taken without anyone having written down what they rested on. The conclusion is kept, the date, the signatures. The reasoning stays in a few heads, and it leaves with them.

That is the starting point of these essays.

He runs Datatropy and works with executive committees on what data and artificial intelligence change about the way their organisations decide.

He served the arrangements these essays examine before he set out to describe them.