Julien Simon
Operating Partner and Head of the AI Studio, Fortino Capital
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Julien Simon is Operating Partner and Head of the AI Studio at Fortino Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm. He works with portfolio companies on the step most AI programs miss: getting an agent or a small language model into daily use, and measuring what it returns. Before Fortino Capital he was VP and Chief Evangelist at Arcee AI, Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face, and Global Evangelist for AI and machine learning at AWS. He wrote Learn Amazon SageMaker, runs a YouTube channel on AI engineering, and publishes The AI Realist, a newsletter that reads filings, model cards and legislation instead of press releases. He speaks in English and French.
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Topics
Why enterprise AI pilots stall, and what production teams do differently
Five mistakes keep AI agents out of production, and a different set of changes moves a pilot onto the P&L. This keynote walks through both, using real deployments, and ends on what the audience changes on Monday.
Audience: CEOs, executive committees, portfolio leaders. Format: keynote, 30 to 45 minutes. English or French. Delivered at the Sommet de la Transformation Agentique, Paris, September 22, 2026.
Small language models: free, private, local
A small model on your own hardware can beat a hosted API on cost, privacy and control. This talk shows when it does, when it does not, and how to prove the difference on your own data. Live demos of local inference and evaluation, with code the audience keeps.
Audience: CTOs, engineering leaders, product teams. Format: keynote (30 to 45 minutes) or technical deep dive with live demos (60 to 90 minutes). English or French.
Open models, sovereignty and hardware: choosing what to run where
Open-weight, self-hosted and sovereign are three different properties, and vendors blur them. This talk defines each one and shows how to choose models and infrastructure on license, cost and legal scope.
Audience: CTOs, boards, public-sector technology leaders. Format: keynote, 30 to 45 minutes, or fireside chat. English or French.
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