'It's Not About Having Lots of Ideas, It's About Embedding Them' - Bpifrance’s Head of Ideation

Sebastien Schneider previews his October 16 talk at Corinium's virtual event, in which he gives his assessment of the future impact of generative AI on innovation

By Eoin Connolly

Financial leaders ought to rethink how they define innovation and how they’re approaching generative AI. That's the message from Sebastien Schneider, Head of the Ideation Factory at Bpifrance, who is due to address industry peers at Corinium's CDAO Financial Services Europe event on October 16.

Schneider leads the bank’s internal innovation hub, helping France’s leading public investment bank support SMEs in their development and investments. In his upcoming session, Is Generative AI Just Another Innovation, or Something Transformative?, he’ll unpack why generative AI is more than just another IT trend and what organizations must do to extract real value from it.

“Innovation isn’t about having lots of ideas,” Schneider says. “It’s about taking ideas into action at scale, embedding them into culture and process so they create measurable impact.”

From creativity to scalable innovation

Schneider’s talk will open by exploring the difference between invention and innovation, and, by extension, between creativity and execution. Brainstorming produces ideas quickly, he notes, but innovation demands technical expertise and the right company culture fit to turn ideas into usable products and services.

“Innovation isn’t a normal project with a start and end date. It’s an ongoing investment in the unknown,” Schneider explains. “To succeed, companies need to build an innovation mindset that involves every employee, every manager, and every process.”

Schneider will trace generative AI’s rapid rise, from decades-old roots to its breakout moment with GPT-3 in 2020, and explain the potential for this still-immature technology to both transform and destabilise organizations.

He’ll highlight the pace of change (“something new appears every three to four months”), the shift toward multimodal models – combining text, speech, image, and video – and the sustainability and compute-power challenge as demand for GPUs soars. The risks of “AI feeding on AI” as models increasingly train on machine-generated data will also feature.

“Generative AI has come into society faster than any technology before it, but it’s still evolving, and companies need to be constantly retraining and reintegrating new developments,” Schneider says.

Data governance and culture will decide winners

Rather than chase hype, Schneider urges organizations to start with their data. Poor data quality may be acceptable in small pilots, he warns, but it becomes a liability at scale.

“Your own company data is the key to making generative AI valuable,” he says. “Without strong governance and quality, you’ll feed AI poor inputs, get poor results, and GenAI will only expose what’s broken in your organization.”

He’ll also outline why partnerships with specialist providers, hyper-agile project management, and leadership buy-in are critical to moving from proof-of-concepts to full-scale deployments.

Finally, Schneider, who believes leaders must combine experimentation with clear guardrails, will touch on Europe’s AI Act and the ethical imperatives of explainability and transparency.

“Generative AI isn’t just an IT product,” he notes. “It’s a creative partner and, increasingly, an agent acting on your behalf. But that power must be matched with responsibility, transparency and data quality.”

Join us on October 16

Schneider’s session, “Is Generative AI Just Another Innovation, or Something Transformative?” is part of Corinium’s October 16 CDAO Financial Services Europe virtual event. Attendees will learn practical steps for integrating generative AI responsibly, avoiding common pitfalls, and building a culture that turns experimentation into measurable business value.

Register now to secure your place.