Philippe Boulanger - Speaker on intelligence artificielle

Philippe Boulanger speaks on the following topics: innovation, transformation digitale, intelligence artificielle, agilite, changement, digital, prospective and audace.

To book Philippe Boulanger, contact the Lespeakers agency. An advisor will call you back to scope the event, dates and format.

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Philippe Boulanger's fees:

• Conference : 6500 €
• Master of ceremonies : 6500 €

Booking is handled through Lespeakers.

Philippe Boulanger speaks as speaker and master of ceremony in french and english.

Yes, Philippe Boulanger can host your event as a master of ceremonies.

Here is where Philippe Boulanger is based: France.

Philippe Boulanger's speaking locations: Dans le monde entier.

Philippe Boulanger offers the following formats: Conférence, Maître de cérémonie, Animation d'événement, Conférence plénière, conférence spéciale pour COMEX ou CODIR, déjeuner ou dîner-conférence, convention, séminaire, assemblée générale, atelier, Format dérivé court (TEDx – environ 15 minutes).

Comité exécutif, Comité de direction, CEO, COO, DRH, CDO, CIO, managers, entrepreneurs.

Before becoming a speaker, I spent over thirty years at the heart of innovation, technology, and business. I have been an entrepreneur, executive, technical director, inventor, mentor, and builder of international teams.

I began my journey in the world of research and computing. After my time at the IBM research center in La Gaude, I founded my first company while completing my PhD in computer science. This was long before startup culture became popular in France.

I then held leadership positions at Sagem, Apple, Sony, and later Neopost, now Quadient. At Apple, in Cupertino, I led the Communication Products and Technologies group and oversaw a European R&D center. At Sony, I participated in the launch of VAIO PCs in Europe, Sony Style, and the Aibo robot. At Neopost, I led over 1,100 engineers, consultants, and researchers spread across more than twenty sites worldwide, and I created Neopost Labs, the company's innovation lab.

Before becoming a speaker, I was already a practitioner of innovation. The stage came later, as a way to convey what I had learned in the real world: the successes, the blockages, the organizational absurdities, the human biases, the turf wars, and the conditions that truly allow innovation to thrive.

What made me become a speaker was first and foremost a frustration. I saw too many powerful ideas die within organizations, not because they were bad, but because they were misunderstood, poorly defended, poorly carried, or stifled by corporate culture.

I saw brilliant collaborators become cautious. I saw intelligent managers defend the status quo. I saw leaders wanting to innovate while often, without realizing it, creating the conditions that prevented their teams from doing so.

I understood that the real obstacle to innovation was not solely technological. It was human. It lay in biases, fears, limiting beliefs, social conformity, poor communication, lack of psychological safety, and the inability to experiment quickly.

I became a speaker because I wanted to convey this understanding on a large scale. I wanted to help organizations see what they had not yet seen. I wanted to make the stage an accelerator of awareness, not just a moment of inspiration.

I am invited because I do not speak about innovation from the sidelines. I have experienced innovation from the inside: as an entrepreneur, leader, technical director, head of international teams, mentor, author, and speaker.

I have worked in environments where innovation was not a slogan, but a strategic constraint: Apple, Sony, Neopost/Quadient, startups, investment funds, executive committees, R&D teams, international organizations. I have led over 1,100 engineers, consultants, and researchers across more than twenty sites around the world, created Neopost Labs, and obtained several patents.

I am also invited because my talks are not top-down. I do not simply come to tell beautiful stories about Apple, Sony, or artificial intelligence. I create experiences for the audience. I demonstrate live the biases, blockages, compliance reflexes, fears, and mechanisms that hinder innovation.

My difference lies in this combination: field experience, systemic perspective, experiential pedagogy, humor, strategic rigor, and the ability to make complex subjects immediately understandable. On my website, my interactive experiments are described as my trademark: the audience does not just hear about innovation, they feel it.

My unique angle is to consider innovation as a human system before it is a technological subject.

I look at innovation through what happens in brains, emotions, teams, cultures, structures, decisions, and behaviors. I am equally interested in strategy and cognitive biases. As much in artificial intelligence as in the fear of being replaced. As much in innovation methods as in the psychological safety that allows one to express a disturbing idea without being punished.

My angle is also experiential. I do not want to just explain biases: I want the audience to experience them. I do not want to just talk about psychological safety: I want participants to feel what happens when it is absent. I do not want to just explain experimentation: I want the audience to physically understand why it reduces risk.

In short: I do not talk about innovation as a concept. I make it observable, emotional, memorable, and actionable. My book describes my choice to “innovate in the way we communicate about innovation” with live experiments with participants.

The audience experiences my interventions as an experience, not as a top-down conference. Participants are not just sitting to listen to ideas about innovation: they are engaged in experiments, questions, surprises, and collective awareness.

Humor plays an important role. It helps to lower defenses, make sensitive topics more accessible, and create a bond with the audience. But humor is never gratuitous: it serves the message.

The rhythm is constructed. I seek to avoid long explanatory tunnels. I alternate personal stories, concepts, business examples, experiments, moments of laughter, and more serious moments. In my book, I explain that my introductory experiment is designed to be short, captivating, fun, simple, impactful, instructive, and message-bearing.

What I seek is that particular moment when faces light up after laughter: the audience has just understood something about themselves, not just about the subject.

I try to apply a simple principle, inspired by David Avrin, an American speaker colleague: it must be ridiculously easy to work with me.

An organizer already has enough topics to manage: the venue, the audience, the leaders, the schedules, the technical aspects, the service providers, the unforeseen events, the last-minute changes. My role is not to add complexity. My role is to reduce the mental load.

Specifically, I am responsive, clear, and structured from the brief. I seek to quickly understand the context, the objectives of the event, the profile of the audience, sensitive messages, explicit expectations, and unspoken elements. I ask the right questions in advance to avoid unpleasant surprises on the day.

I am reliable regarding deadlines, elements to provide, slides, technical constraints, arrival times, and exchanges with the teams. When an organizer asks me for an adjustment, I first look for the solution, not the complication.

I am also flexible without losing the framework. I can adapt my content, my rhythm, certain examples, the duration, the level of interaction, or the intensity of the message according to the context. But I remain clear about what is necessary to preserve the impact of the intervention.

What organizers generally appreciate is that they feel they have a professional partner in front of them, not just a speaker who arrives, talks, and leaves. I want them to think: “With Philippe, it’s simple, it’s clear, it’s smooth, and he understands the stakes.”

An example? The organizer is aware of the key steps of my arrival at the event site. One or two texts can reassure them, everything is under control!

My goal is for the experience to be as reassuring for the organizer as it is impactful for the audience.

After my session, the audience can first expect a strong awareness: the barriers to innovation are not always where we look for them. They are not just in the budget, technology, or processes. They are often in behaviors, beliefs, fears, unspoken issues, biases, and daily interactions.

Participants leave with a common language. They can name what has been happening invisibly until now: status quo bias, fear of judgment, lack of psychological safety, poor formulation of an idea, confusion between creativity, invention, and innovation, absence of experimentation, alignment deficit.

They also leave with a desire to act. My goal is not for them to say, “that was interesting.” My goal is for them to ask themselves: “What can I test right now? What idea have I kept to myself for too long? What team ritual do we need to change? What simple experiment can we launch? What conversation have we been avoiding for too long?”

The concrete transformation I aim for is threefold: individual awareness, better quality of collective dialogue, and a faster transition from idea to experimentation. The workshops described on my site also aim for practical tools and measurable changes in the way teams approach innovation, communication, culture, and growth.