Laurent Ach

As Chief Data & AI Officer, I am leading the work to make Solocal become an AI company, by leveraging data and AI for business, products, employees and clients

I was the CTO of Qwant until the beginning of 2025. Qwant is a company that develops a web search engine focused on respecting data privacy, built by an excellent tech team of web and mobile engineers, data scientists, infrastructure and security engineers. The company was acquired by the founders of OVHcloud and Caisse des Dépôts in 2023. In 2024, Qwant formed a joint venture with Ecosia to strengthen the development of search engine technology. We have been developing technologies for crawling, extracting signals from documents and queries, ranking, and indexing, utilizing many types of machine learning models. Additionally, we have smartly integrated generative AI into the search results.

I created and managed for 8 years the European team of Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT), the research and innovation department of Rakuten group. I created RIT Paris in 2014, which was located in Rakuten France office. Our domains were Machine Learning and innovative User Experience. For 2 years, additionally, I was CTO of Rakuten France.

I was CTO of Living Actor from 2006 to 2013. We developed software for the creation and animation of avatars and virtual assistants, and we built on-line applications and web services used by many companies in Europe and the United States.

Research Collaborative Projects

I participated in several French and European research projects.

• I led Avatar 1:1 (Avatar at Human Scale), a French collaborative project, which gathers three companies (Living Actor, Cliris, Mazedia) and two research organizations (Institut Telecom - CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie). Its goal is to create a dialog with an avatar in a public area, including verbal and non verbal communication dimensions.

• ILHAIRE was a European project about laughter, gathering University of Mons (Belgium), CNRS (France), University of Augsburg, Università degli Studi of Genova, University College London, Queen's University Belfast, University of Zurich, Supélec (France), and Living Actor.

• I led MyPresentingAvatar project, finished in 2012, which allowed to automatically generate presentations by an avatar. The speech and gestures were generated from text semantic analysis.

Around 2004, I organised processes and tools for SAGEM (now SAFRAN) to manage the compliance of mobile phones with a huge database of requirements coming from many operators in the world.

During the last years of the Internet bubble I took part in a great project of 3D streaming data that allowed to navigate inside CAD models and virtual cities without any limitations of texture resolution or numbers of polygons.

In the 90's I was an Artificial Intelligence and 3D engineer at Syseca, which was part of Thomson-CSF, which became Thales group. In this company, I worked on a project for the French Navy to create a track fusion system using neural networks. I also created the 3D visualization of SERPAM, an Air Force mission debriefing system that was still in use and evolving more than 20 years later.

Around 1995, I joined a team of 3D pionneers coming to Thales from TDI to form the Virtual Reality group whose customers included the Industrial Design Department of Renault in France and Honda R&D in Japan. I also participated in the "VR for Europe" project funded by the European commission to promote the use of Virtual Reality in the European industry.