About
Gilles Babinet
An entrepreneur since the age of 22, Gilles Babinet has spent the last fifteen years working on what digital technology, and now artificial intelligence, does to businesses and to public policy. Laitao is the company through which he consults, teaches and speaks.
Entrepreneur
He has started companies in very different fields: consulting (Absolut, then Laitao), construction (Escalade Industrie), mobile music (Musiwave, sold for €139 million), co-creation (eYeka) and decision-making tools (Captain Dash). He is also a co-founder of Urbantech Ventures, which focuses on AI and the environment in infrastructure.
Public roles
He was the first president of France’s National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique) in 2011, and its co-president from 2021 to 2025, where he launched the Café IA initiative. In June 2025 he was appointed president of the Café IA mission. He is France’s Digital Champion to the European Commission, and sat on the AI Committee set up by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne in late 2023, whose report went to the President of the Republic.
For the Institut Montaigne think tank he has co-chaired several task forces on digital policy and competitiveness. He sat on the board of EY from 2013 to 2019.
Teaching and writing
He teaches at HEC and at INSP, France’s school for senior civil servants. In 2013 he created the eCAC40 with Les Echos, a yearly ranking of the digital maturity of CAC 40 companies, and he produced an eight-hour online course on digital transformation in local government.
He is the author of several books in French, most recently Le Péril IA (Le Passeur, 2026) and Green IA (Odile Jacob, 2024), and writes regularly about AI.
Work with Laitao
A consulting project, a keynote, an interview: drop us a line.