Matthieu Grymonprez

Twenty-six years inside Adeo, eight of them as CDO: Matthieu Grymonprez runs the digital, tech and data of the group behind Leroy Merlin, Weldom and Obramat. His line "un agent n'a pas de bon sens" framed the DataGen episode recorded in May 2026 with Romain Taillade, Decathlon's Global CTO, at the Dev Summit the two groups co-organised in Lille. A human compensates for a mediocre definition with experience; an agent applies it as written, including when it holds for France and not for Spain.

The five-year platformisation of Adeo's information system, decomposing it into business domains exposed by API, was built to absorb Leroy Merlin's marketplace, not to prepare for agents; the cart API, the customer API and the payment API turned out to be the substrate an agentic model expects. Whoever has not finished that transition runs two revolutions at once, cultural and technological, while AI compresses the calendar.

The prescriptions are blunt: ship a framework even an imperfect one so teams start building on it, speak only ROI and customer experience to the board, and learn the technology mainly so vendors cannot fleece you. He asks for no AI budget and funds new work out of gains such as compressed JIRA tickets. A precedent paid for dearly stays in view: Adeo's self-service BI produced more than 150,000 dashboards before the return to certified data products.

His worry is lock-in of enterprise intelligence: the agentic harness, the memory. The open source brick he says is missing is agent orchestration, with registry, lifecycle, permissions and skills.