{"id":2065685,"date":"2026-07-06T11:47:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T09:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/2026\/07\/06\/five-years-of-patience-before-the-first-agent\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T11:49:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T09:49:19","slug":"five-years-of-patience-before-the-first-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/2026\/07\/06\/five-years-of-patience-before-the-first-agent\/","title":{"rendered":"Five years of patience before the first agent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What a pharmaceutical company just demonstrated on stage at VivaTech says more about an organization\u2019s true level of maturity when it comes to AI than any press release from the company ever could.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

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On the VivaTech stage, a man pulls out his phone, opens an app called Concierge<\/em>, and improvises. He plays a sales rep from Sanofi who is about to meet with a doctor, interrupts her three times, changes his approach, and asks for an email instead of a verbal response. The assistant remains unfazed: he already knows the patient\u2019s profile, the doctor\u2019s history, and the likely objection. Nothing about the scene is spectacular. That is precisely what makes it so instructive. <\/p>\n\n

Because what the demonstration doesn’t show\u2014and what its two protagonists, Emmanuel Frenera, Sanofi’s chief digital officer, and Love Kotari, head of AI at Snowflake, eventually revealed\u2014is more interesting than the agent itself: it took five years before they were allowed to get to this point.<\/p>\n\n

Infrastructure Before Action<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The luxury industry is talking a lot about artificial intelligence right now. Pilot projects, partnerships, \u201cdigital transformation\u201d: the terminology is spreading faster than its actual implementation, and that is precisely the subject of *The Silent Divide*\u2014this gap, rarely acknowledged in public, between a fashion house\u2019s rhetoric about its technological modernity and the actual state of its data. <\/p>\n\n

Sanofi has nothing to sell to the luxury sector and does not target it. That is precisely what makes its story useful as a counterexample: the company has no reason to embellish its narrative. Frenera puts it bluntly: five years ago, the group\u2019s data was stored in what he calls \u201cdata dumps\u201d\u2014fragmented repositories with no common governance. The decision was to consolidate everything onto a single platform before even considering anything more sophisticated. The first result of this investment, after several years of work, was not an agent or even a predictive model. It was a dashboard. A comprehensive view\u2014finally possible\u2014of data that had never been accessible that way before. <\/p>\n\n

It wasn’t until 2025\u2014after that foundation was laid\u2014that Sanofi and Snowflake began building what is now Concierge<\/em>. The agent didn\u2019t come first. It came last\u2014the reward for the behind-the-scenes work that no one cares about at conferences. <\/p>\n\n

What the agent must keep quiet about<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The temptation for a fashion house is to tell the story in reverse: to start with the feature that makes an impression and let the rest be left to the imagination. The risk isn\u2019t just narrative. Love Kotari emphasizes a specific technical point that deserves to be highlighted. <\/p>\n\n

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Details.<\/strong> Each agent deployed at Sanofi is assigned a unique identity, a defined role, and an audited scope of access\u2014distinct from that of any other agent or department. During the demonstration, Kotari points out that invoking the same assistant from his own account would produce a different response, since he does not have the same privileges. Governance is not something that can be negotiated after the fact: it is a prerequisite for access to the agent, not an additional layer on top of it. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

This discipline comes at a cost that no House has any interest in downplaying if it decides to embrace it: transforming an entire team of \u201cpeople who interrogate systems\u201d into \u201cpeople who supervise autonomous agents,\u201d in Kotari\u2019s words, first requires knowing who can see what\u2014and being able to prove it. For an industry as strict about protecting its intangible assets as the luxury sector\u2014recipes, techniques, customer files, design archives\u2014the stakes should be clear without needing further explanation. <\/p>\n\n

The number that doesn’t flatter anyone<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The pharmaceutical industry operates with a disadvantage that the luxury sector does not face: Frenera points out that it takes ten to twelve years to get a molecule from the lab to the patient, with a 90% failure rate. It is this constraint\u2014not a passing trend\u2014that has driven Sanofi toward simulation and governed data\u2014a matter of economic survival rather than image. The luxury sector, on the other hand, does not face this inherent pressure. It can afford to announce a pilot project without ever publishing the results. This is undoubtedly why strategic silence is more comfortable there than elsewhere: nothing compels a House to say whether its product is working\u2014or even if it exists at all. <\/p>\n\n

The only figure Kotari cites regarding Concierge\u2019s<\/em> actual use\u2014a roughly 40% reduction in workload for field sales reps\u2014is meaningful only because it\u2019s tied to a specific tool that\u2019s in production and was demonstrated live in front of an audience. Would a luxury brand announce a comparable figure under the same conditions\u2014on stage\u2014with the risk that the tool might malfunction in front of an audience? The question remains open, and that is precisely what distinguishes a demonstration from a statement of intent. <\/p>\n\n

A lesson no one wants to hear<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Frenera wraps up the discussion with a remark that should concern anyone who thinks the issue of data is settled once and for all: \u201cAI-ready\u201d data will never be a done deal, he says, but rather a \u201cnever-ending pursuit\u201d\u2014data will continue to exist in unconsolidated Excel files, regardless of how mature the organization is. This is not an admission of failure. It is a warning against the idea that an audit or a platform alone would be enough to close the book on the matter. <\/p>\n\n

For a company that wants to follow a similar path, the question is therefore not whether it has \u201cAI,\u201d but whether it would be willing to spend five years organizing its data before it can boast about it. How many companies would publish such a timeline? How many, on the other hand, would prefer to skip straight to the demonstration\u2014and leave people to guess what, if anything, lies behind the screen? <\/p>\n\n

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