Good Pirates Ship Fast: L'Oreal's AI-First in 90 Days (May '24), Accelerating Since | Thomas Menard

Good Pirates Ship Fast: L'Oreal's AI-First in 90 Days (May '24), Accelerating Since | Thomas Menard

From AI with Alec. Get smarter on AI. The easy way. by Alec Coughlin

December 9, 2025 · 47 min · Season 1 · Episode 24

About this episode

Thomas Menard discusses L’Oreal's rapid AI-first strategy and its impact on business value.

Want to see AI-first at scale? Check out Thomas Menard and the rockstar team at L’Oreal showing us how it’s done.Embracing AI to drive “idea to impact” in less than 90 days for a 100,000 person enterprise is impressive.To do it in May 2024 is outrageous. My man Thomas Menard is a “good pirate” who personifies the “ship fast, learn, iterate” approach. No analysis paralysis. No tech for tech’s sake. No science projects. Just a ruthless commitment to augmenting people to create business value.Intelligent systems that abstract complexity so everybody, engineers and non-engineers, can create value without becoming AI experts.What’s next?From Gen-AI-as-a-Service to a proper Agentic AI platform. Realizing the dual benefits of AI infrastructure while balancing the buy vs build equation accordingly.Think context engineering, AI-first architecture, platform design and continuous improvement.1% better every day. This is the way.s/o Harrison Chase, LangChain + GCP

People in this episode

Host: Alec Coughlin

Guest: Thomas Menard

Topics covered

  • AI implementation
  • business value
  • technology adoption
  • enterprise solutions
  • continuous improvement

Keywords

  • AI-first
  • L’Oreal
  • business impact
  • technology
  • continuous improvement
  • Gen-AI-as-a-Service
  • Agentic AI

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: L’Oreal, LangChain, GCP

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