“A former professional footballer, I’m an artificial intelligence consultant at Deloitte and launched my own start-up at the same time”

“After my science graduation from the French High School in Kinshasa, Congo, I joined the IUT of Electrical Engineering and Industrial Computing in Lille, in 2012. After a year, as I am motivated, I did the MPSI science preparation. After these two intensive years, I was accepted to ESIEA, an engineering school specialized in digital technology.

Graduated in computing and electronics engineering specializing in artificial intelligence, in 2018 I took a six-month internship at Deloitte at the end of my studies. I haven’t changed companies since! But I had the opportunity to evolve, now I am a senior consultant in artificial intelligence (AI).

In the beginning, I mainly dealt with data processing, today I work more directly with our business clients. My goal is to transform their process and methodology in order to optimize their activities. And specifically, I help with the use of generative AI software that I develop, for example, to summarize, analyze and synthesize financial reports.

GenAI changed everything

This takes place in two phases: first I question the company about what they would like to improve with AI in their daily life, their business – relying on use cases to present them the value of generative AI – then I implement the corresponding solutions and support them.

AI exploded with ChatGPT as it became accessible and understandable, thanks to the addition of a conversation layer. If classical artificial intelligence is capable of classifying, listing and predicting if given instructions (via computer code), so-called generative artificial intelligence understands the question, autonomously calculates and gives the answer.

And this disruptive technology concerns absolutely all sectors and all types of companies, from small businesses to large groups. This is why I love my job. Which did not prevent me from having very busy activities at the same time. For three seasons, for example, I was a professional soccer player in the 3rd division in Ivry-sur-Seine, south of Paris. I trained on Thursday and Friday evenings after work, and the matches were on Saturday or Sunday.

Triple “pro” life

In September 2019 I also signed up for a month at Cours Florent to have an extra bow string. I said to myself (and still say): why don’t I become an actor these days! (Laughs) In the meantime, it mainly served me to embody the face of my company in a campaign to recruit people, launched at the end of 2023 in the Paris metro!

And then, above all, I also launched an AI-based start-up to help learn languages ​​and discover cultures. The idea came to me when I was on an exchange in Japan in 2016, during my studies. I was constantly writing down words, expressions, sentences, information on sheets of paper… which I kept losing.

Then I dreamed of an app that would allow me to put everything in one place and quickly search the collected information. I’ve searched the web, only found equivalents of the “notes” app, which were pretty flat and limited. So I started coding this app that I dreamed about over the weekend, already in Japan.

Already 1000 people

Almost seven years later, I finally launched my app called “Leafwords”. In order to simplify the administrative processes, I myself created the eponymous start-up in Ireland. It is available for a year and a half. There were a lot of beta phases, testing and updating because I did everything myself, with my savings (about 8000 euros).

Leafwords now has a community of 1,000 people. Right now everything is free, but of course I’m thinking about a business model. I don’t know if I could live off of it one day. Regardless, I want to be able to say to myself at the end of the film: ‘OK, I tried, I did everything I wanted, regardless of the result’, and above all not to regret it. »