"Mon job tient sur ce post-it" | 20 minutes avec le Directeur Général de Bouygues : Olivier Roussat

Well really not. Well no, wait, if I look at the CVs, but never!

What I often say and what I remind my children is one third work, one third luck and only one third talent.

Good morning.

A technology, when it arrives, normally it takes a while to get it into production in large enterprise systems. Generative AI arrived at the end of 2022, the end of 2023. You had a generative AI system implemented on the Bouygues Télécom customer advisor workstations in production which allows you to listen on the fly to all the discussions that the advisors have with customers, who automatically offer you a summary which is written in the customer file. A technology which, in one year, becomes a mass technology used by 5,000 people in the company at once, that is something which is extremely rare. This means that it is something extremely powerful since it is used extremely quickly. And that's not normal. Normality, you generally have a fairly gradual take-off. And there, moreover, I don't know the technology adoption figures when we compare them with the different sizes of applications that we saw in social networks, the way in which they were adopted. But it is a movement of incredible power and which is also evolving extremely quickly. Not only is this something that changes the way of working, but we see that by being refined, now the AI knows how to read tables, it knows how to read drawings. At the beginning, she only knew how to read texts and she was able to draw a lot of conclusions from them in the way she worked.

Generative AI, a bit for... We recently had a job where we tried to define a bit of how to release the group's missions. It was a very serious group with professional bosses, completely honorable people. We had chosen the words that characterized us and we wanted to try to make sentences that defined what we had. Look at what ChatGPT offered us. And in the end, it was practically the best proposal we had. Although we had been saying to ourselves for half an hour 'no, but we could say it like that and not like that'. So it's still something of great power.

I lived in a company called Nokia, which was one of the very, very big world leaders, which had a certain arrogance, which was ultimately swept away with the arrival of Apple, which literally made this disappear. BlackBerry before too. BlackBerry which was a company from Northern Canada, which was still not super easy from a commercial point of view, which really had the feeling that only they could decide on things. ChatGPT is perhaps the system that will shake Google. Which is a Google monster. Well, a monster in the negative sense, but in the sense of a huge company with a pretty crazy level of profit. And it is not impossible that in terms of search, where Google had taken a position that was absolutely... well, really dominant, that's the right term, it could be shaken up by ChatGPT. And it's interesting because technological breakthroughs can change the ranking of companies or the ranking of what we use. You can demonetize something pretty quickly and raise something instead. Whereas when you look at Google, and the revenue it generates and the mass of money it has available to reinvest everywhere, you say 'it's a box, it's there for 1000 years'. Because she has a virtual monopoly on what she does. In fact, something like ChatGPT can be a real Achilles talent that changes your world ranking of what's happening. It's interesting because ultimately there is no situation that can be obtained and that can be kept forever. It's rather reassuring.

When I was little, I hesitated between three careers. I took the route that allowed me to join the air force, the Salon-de-Provence school, and so I took a whole bunch of exams at the Laverand hospital in Marseille. And then I did tests, different things that allowed me to join this training. I then hesitated to pursue medicine. And the third career that I imagined, but which was not necessarily my first priority, was actually going to engineering school. My first choice was initially really the Air Force to become a fighter pilot. And then finally, I fell back on engineer. And I found myself in Lyon in 82 to attend INSA Lyon. It's a job that also fascinates me a lot, fighter plane pilot. It was something, it was... I'm from the Top Gun generation. So we had everything that it conveyed.

So, I started my career in a very particular structure at IBM called IBM Information Network, which was in fact the ancestor of the Internet. That is to say that my first job was to connect computers that IBM employees had on their desks, to connect them, to network them with the messaging system that already existed, which was not at all the period of the laptop PC. You only knew the laptop PC. But before the laptop, there was a special thing with central units. And it turns out that IBM had developed an architecture, a technology that allowed computers around the world to communicate with each other. And for example, you had software, well reservation systems that were global. So my job was to make it work on the French side and then I had a hand in the European systems.

May 1995, I came quite... Well, more on a whim basically. And I arrived with a few years already behind me, this year which was already dedicated to this whole Internet world. And I experienced the arrival of the Internet when IBM began to take this turn, right at the beginning. That is to say the first things, we had to equip them in 92 or 93, where we sold the first PCs, the PC as it existed before, not the laptop, the PC. IBM, we had started to make these Internet connections that we made with an RTC model, in which we connected, you know, you said 'Beep beep beep'. And so when I arrived here, I still had continuity in the technological network part. And then over time, obviously, things got better. And I think that with what we are now learning, with everything that is being done in the AI revolution, we are going to talk about it. We are really facing something that is going to be massive, really massive, much more massive than anything I have known.

I had a career at IBM which started in August 88. And I was quite lucky, actually. Ultimately, I progressed quite quickly at IBM. At one point I was the youngest manager, what we called a first-line manager, that is to say someone who supervises at the time, I must have had around fifteen people, maybe - be around twenty. I had this after about 18 months. All right. And then I was put on quite quickly. I then had what we call second-line manager, that is to say I was a manager's manager. I left IBM France in May 95 to join IBM Europe. A few months before, the woman I had met, who would become my wife, had problems at IBM, in fact a problem of harassment. It's 95, in 95, he didn't put everything into it. And so what happened at the time happened, which was she had to leave the company. And I considered that in these conditions, I had to leave. So I left pretty quickly and left the company the next day. And I arrived at Bouygues Télécom, right at the base of Bouygues Télécom, since I started with a team of six maintenance technicians. So it was really up and down. Afterwards, I was lucky and you need a lot of luck. I had a lot of them. Lots of work? Yes, but you need luck. You need... What is needed first, luck or work? You need... So in order, you need a third of commitment, a third of work. What I often say and what I remind my children is one third work, one third luck and only one third talent. Don't imagine that your talent allows you to succeed alone, that's not enough. And the important thing is that it's only a third of talent.

They are two completely different things. There is one, he has a mandate of 4 years. At the end of 4 years, it was still one of the largest democracies in the world. I have no doubt that at the end of 4 years, he will no longer be there. So he can make transformations for 4 years, but on the other hand, it will be limited to 4 years, he has already served a mandate. Trump is a very particular phenomenon which is necessarily transitory. Elon Musk, this is not a transitory phenomenon. Everything he touched, he transformed in an incredible way. When you look at what he did with Tesla, you have to understand that car manufacturers copy what Tesla has done to date. The biggest, they have 100 years of history behind them. They discovered that Tesla had to, instead of assembling 150 parts to make the back of a car, Tesla had imagined huge aluminum presses. He suddenly took out a piece that replaced that. It lowered the cost of production extremely significantly. And they all do the same. Here, we have someone who is still relatively young, who still seems to have a lot of ideas when we see him bring the rocket back to its launch pad. It's something that's just mind-blowing. Do you have childish eyes? You might even think that when you see the video, you even have the feeling that they rewound it. Like in movies where we go back in time. It's still something that's impressive. And it's going to last a long time, though.

There is a phenomenon that exists, what is clear, is that the speed of evolution, of change, is much faster than it was. When I started working, people thought things were moving faster than before. Honestly, at the moment, things are going much faster than when I started working. But on the other hand, to the extent that you are immersed in a system that is going faster and faster, you are actually adapting. And in 20 years, you will say to yourself 'it's really going much faster than when I was in the office with Olivier Roussat, 32 Avenue Hoche, in 2024'. But because it's natural. And we have, look at what we just said about the evolution of what happened with cryptocurrencies, the fact of having a generative AI that changes your life, things are really going a lot, much, much faster. And the connections that we have made possible, the sharing of knowledge that we have made possible with everything that the Internet does, everything that social networks do, that allows us to go even faster in gathering knowledge and ultimately in being able to invent new things. So it will only go faster, that's for sure. It's not going to slow down, it can only speed up. Because you can bounce back on lots of things that we couldn't bounce back on before.

There are times when you say 'no, that's for those teams, I'm not going to go there, I don't understand that'. So there are things you don't want to get into. First, something that may seem quite trivial to you, when you look, I don't know how much time you spend on social networks, on Insta or on TikTok. On average, I think it's about 40 minutes a day. It's not bad, it's not much.

It's not much, because when you see the way the screen has absorbed what young people, especially all young teenagers, can do on the screen, you still have the feeling that maybe that's all similarly slightly futile. Maybe we could do without it. The job I do is to try to ensure that if there are new things that come out, we have to know how to integrate them to maintain our differentiation from our customers. And if we don't know how to do that, well, we'll be overtaken by those who have seen what new things could bring and who haven't integrated it. I'll take a fairly simple example. The shift towards the Internet has left people behind who did not make the effort to look closely enough at what they could do with it. And in fact, it's so important in the operating modes that it's better to do without them because otherwise, because they're going to go into the wall in fact.

In 2004, what did I do in 2004?

November 17, 2004.

Not bad, yes.

Yes.

So in fact, the network went down at 5:50 a.m. and we rectified the situation, we put the network back up at 11:50 p.m. or so. In 2004, you don't have the Internet like we have today. Those who give rhythm to the information are the radios, the 1 p.m. news, the 8 p.m. news and the newspapers which generally are... The text is stabilized at 10 p.m. Concretely, what does that mean? This means that when we have our breakdown, at first, we don't understand at first what's happening because it still takes a little time to realize what's happening. When we realized it, I took a certain number of decisions in the middle of the day on the 17th which allowed us to circumscribe the problem, that is to say, there was a part of our customers who did not realize what was happening, that there was the correct service. And then there was the other part for which we were not able to return it. And in fact, we broadcast the 8 p.m. news where we explained to people that it wasn't working. The publication of the newspapers explained, those which were published on the 18th, that it was not working. However, we returned to service on the 17th at 11:50 p.m. So much so that, in our customers' perception, on the 18th, there was always a malfunction, it was perceived as being 48 hours, it already lasted 19 hours, which is considerable, but it was something very special. This is a period for which, to put absolutely everything back in working order, it took us 72 hours. And it's a period out of the 72 hours, since I'm someone who gets up early, so on the 17th, I had to get up, as usual, around 5 a.m., 5:30 a.m. In fact, between the 17th and the 19th, in the evening, I was only able to sleep 8 hours during this period, because it was still demanding enough for us to get to the end of it. It was... So, in fact, the paradox of this situation is that, ultimately, this breakdown was an accelerator of my career, which is still quite unintuitive, since, in fact, the way handling the breakdown was considered to be good, and it really put me in the spotlight. I would like to point out that the choices which had been made beforehand and which had led to the breakdown were not my responsibility; I had been appointed after they had been put in place. I only intervened to try to sweep the thing away and make it work better.

January 12, 2012, in fact, we know that it's going to be the beginning of January, but we don't know exactly when, and in fact, we discover that it's the 12th. Me, on January 12, I had training speaking, because we are going to make an announcement at the end of January, we are going to launch a new box. So, I work with a consultant in which we prepare the speech, and I am in the auditorium of the tower that we had at the time, which is the current Accord Tower. The offer fell through, and I had an appointment half an hour later, and the consultant came to see me and said 'Okay, well, maybe we'll cancel, since Free has arrived.' I told him, 'Look, no, because he arrived anyway.' So, while we analyze what we need to do, we're not going to do it straight away, so it's going to take a few hours. We're both doing the training, and we spent two hours doing a bunch of stuff on speaking. Then, we had this very particular period, the direct consequence of the arrival of Iliad. It's something very special, it's the fact of entering a world of invective that we didn't have previously. Before the arrival of Iliade, we had cordial relations between operators. Iliade which is the group that owns Free, I say it here. Free arrives, and then we start getting insults in all directions. Besides, we attacked Free at that time, and we won a few tens of millions of euros, because we had been literally insulted. So, we went to the commercial court which ruled in favor of us. And we enter a period where, from that moment on, communication becomes extremely important. And from 2012, I often appear on economic radio stations, on BFM, on all these things, in the press, something I didn't do at all before. And so, it's a fairly strong acceleration of implementation... to try to defend the company and defend the employees. The culmination of all this was 2014, June 2014, in which, in the end, we realized that we were unable to restore business competitiveness naturally, and we were obliged to draw up a fairly big, very, very significant, since we removed approximately 30% of the workforce from a given area. It was 1,000, in total, 1,500 people. And it is only after that that the company starts again and can finally restore its margins, become competitive again and become aggressive again, with a crossing point that we have in 2013, when we launch 4G in October 2013, which is also a way for us to regain competitiveness.