Article published on “Voix d’entrepreneurs” in partnership with Le Figaro on 1 October 2026.
At the Philharmonie de Paris, Roxane Laigle, Co-founder and CEO of Lemrock AI, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, serial entrepreneur and President of VideoLAN, and Maxime Dubouloz, Director Corporate Advisory at Lombard Odier, join Sébastien Couasnon for the latest episode of Voix d’Entrepreneurs. Drawing on their experiences, they explore the ideas and decisions behind new technology ventures – and how AI is reshaping business models and transforming everything in its path.
Roxane Laigle first explored the concept of hyper-personalised commerce at Fnac Darty before founding Lemrock AI to turn her vision into a business. Its focus is agentic commerce: enabling an AI assistant to make purchases on a user’s behalf.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is President of VideoLAN, the association behind VLC, one of the world’s most downloaded software applications, which revolutionised video playback. Thirty years after its creation, VLC continues to evolve, drawing on AI to develop new capabilities.
Maxime Dubouloz, Director of Corporate Advisory at Lombard Odier, brings his advisory perspective, emphasising that traditional businesses must adopt AI or risk falling behind. AI is becoming a matter of competitiveness, he says, yet uptake remains uneven. In France, AI use is growing rapidly but remains limited. According to Insee, just 18% of French companies with 10 or more employees reported using at least one AI technology in 20251. While this represents an eight-percentage-point increase from 2024, it suggests that AI’s growing prominence has yet to translate into widespread business adoption.
Watch Roxane Laigle, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Maxime Dubouloz discuss how AI is transforming entrepreneurship and reshaping business models :
In late 2024, Roxane Laigle saw an opportunity to see how people shop online. As head of Strategy and Innovation at Fnac Darty, she had been exploring hyper-personalisation – “offering the right product, at the right time, to the right person”, as she puts it. The ambition was clear, but a crucial technological building block was missing: the ability to deliver personalised, real-time advice to millions of customers at scale.
According to a Sopra Steria study, AI agents could facilitate EUR 310 billion in transactions across Europe within 10 years
“The advent of generative AI made this revolution possible and prompted me to create Lemrock,” says explains. Generative AI opened the door to conversations with customers, allowing AI assistants to understand their needs and guide their choices as much as a knowledgeable shop assistant would. Agentic commerce takes this further: by acting on a customer’s instructions, the assistant can complete the task on their behalf. In practice, Lemrock connects retailers to these emerging shopping channels by linking their product catalogues to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Le Chat, with real-time prices and stock availability.
“We were the first to develop agentic commerce, at a time when the term itself didn’t even exist,” Roxane explains. “It required a lot of education, as the concept was poorly understood at first.” That early challenge became a competitive advantage. “It allowed us to get a head start and help shape industry standards,” she says. Today, Lemrock has around one hundred clients, including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount and Darty. Its growth reflects the commercial potential of agentic commerce. According to a Sopra Steria study, AI agents could facilitate EUR 310 billion in transactions across Europe within 10 years2.
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Jean-Baptiste Kempf’s career as a tech entrepreneur began somewhat earlier, in 1995. What began as a student project grew into one of the world’s most downloaded software applications: VLC. Its appeal lay in solving a simple but persistent problem: playing video across different formats and devices. A driving force behind its development, Jean-Baptiste is now President of VideoLAN, the association that develops and distributes VLC. “I love working on highly complex technology, but not for experts – I want to put it in the hands of as many people as possible,” he explains.
Far from being blinded by VLC’s success, Jean-Baptiste reinforces the need to keep innovating. At the CES 2025 in Las Vegas, VideoLAN presented an AI-enabled feature that automatically generates and translates video subtitles in real time, entirely offline
It was in this spirit that VLC became ‘open source’ in 2001 – in other words, free of charge, but also freely distributable, usable and modifiable by anyone. Success followed: VLC passed the one-million-download mark in 2004, and two decades later the figure exceeds seven billion, making it one of the most downloaded independent software applications in computing history3. Even though “the actual figure is probably much higher, as the software can be redistributed. It is used, for example, by many large companies such as Airbus, Boeing and La Poste,” Jean-Baptiste adds.
Far from being blinded by VLC’s success, Jean-Baptiste reinforces the need to keep innovating. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2025 in Las Vegas, one of the world’s largest annual technology and innovation trade shows, VideoLAN presented an AI-enabled feature that automatically generates and translates video subtitles in real time, entirely offline. Still under development, the feature is expected to be included in VLC 4.0, extending the software’s capabilities while preserving its independence from an internet connection.
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For businesses yet to adopt AI, the question is increasingly one of competitiveness. “AI is a genuine driver of transformation, and it needs to be integrated,” says Maxime Dubouloz, Director Corporate Advisory at Lombard Odier. Advising entrepreneurs at pivotal stages of their businesses’ development, he sees the ability to adapt as central to building long-term value. Strong financial results alone do not determine a company’s valuation: its agility and prospects for future growth also matter, he says. Delaying adoption could therefore affect more than day-to-day performance, potentially weakening both competitiveness and appeal to prospective buyers. He identifies three approaches to AI adoption, reflecting different levels of business maturity among the small and medium-sized businesses he advises daily.
The first approach, which Maxime observes among around 20% of his clients, is most common among the most experienced business leaders. Confident that their established models can continue to deliver, they prefer to leave AI adoption to the next generation. This raises a strategic concern: postponing change risks leaving the business less competitive and less prepared for the future.
AI is a genuine driver of transformation, and it needs to be integrated. AI can deliver productivity gains that are sometimes enormous and sometimes marginal. But even marginal gains matter: when compounded, they can become phenomenal
The second approach, by far the most common, treats AI primarily as a productivity tool. Businesses use it to automate routine tasks, accelerate research, draft documents, and streamline administrative work. Business leaders who have adopted this approach understand the technology's importance and have a clear view of what it can bring to day-to-day operations. However, they still tend to use AI too late in the value-creation process.
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The third category of entrepreneurs takes a more strategic approach, placing AI at the heart of business transformation. These entrepreneurs embed AI in a broader rethink of their processes, organisational structure and, in some cases, operating models. Maxime Dubouloz describes this as a “powerful” shift, with the potential to build a lasting competitive advantage as improvements accumulate over time. “AI can deliver productivity gains that are sometimes enormous and sometimes marginal. But even marginal gains matter: when compounded, they can become phenomenal,” he says.
Across the discussion, a common message emerges: from pioneering start-ups to established businesses, AI has become a strategic conversation. For entrepreneurs, the challenge is to decide where it can create lasting value, how to integrate it and how quickly to act.
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This is a marketing communication issued by Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd (hereinafter “Lombard Odier”).
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