
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
More episodes of AI with Alec. Get smarter on AI. The easy way.
- Are Your AI Agents Reasoning From a Snapshot That Never Existed? | Tacnode Founder + CEO · May 11, 2026 · 33 min
- "We Don't Do Tokenized Assets" Is the New "We Don't Do the Internet" | Jason Dobbs · April 17, 2026 · 34 min
- The AI Questions CEOs Are Running Out of Time to Ask | Henrik Werdelin · April 9, 2026 · 44 min
- 75% of Your Creative Team's Week Is Wasted. Shane Hegde Built a Salesforce for Creatives to Fix It. · March 27, 2026 · 39 min
- Polsia: The AI That Doesn't Just Help You Build a Business. It Runs it. | Ben Cera · March 15, 2026 · 42 min
- Greg Boone: AI Isn't an Intern, It's an Everything Machine | AI with Alec E26 · February 4, 2026 · 43 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the AI with Alec. Get smarter on AI. The easy way. podcast page.