With over 20 years of experience in the digital field, Baccana Digital Consulting is a Monaco-based agency specializing in e-commerce website design, SEO, and digital marketing. Baccana offers a complete range of digital transformation services, including custom development, Web3, secure cloud, and virtual reality. With a collaborative and personalized approach, Baccana Monaco supports its clients from very diverse sectors, from yachting to tourism, and from healthcare to consulting, both locally and internationally. Their partnership with Monaco Cloud also allows them to offer sovereign and secure storage solutions, particularly for sensitive data such as health data.
Can you tell us about your professional background and the story of Baccana Monaco?
I’ve had several professional lives, with IT constantly pushing me to question myself. I dove into it in the late 90s. It’s a field that changes all the time—never a dull moment. We come from San Francisco, where we created a software as a service (SaaS). We experienced the good years in the late 90s, the 2000 bubble, the beginning of social networks… We lived through it!
I was part of the SEO SAMBA adventure, initially a software for SEO, which was then adopted by franchise networks. It still exists, but I settled in Monaco ten years ago. The company is now managed by a team based in the United States, while I decided to return to Monaco. Having traveled extensively, Monaco presented itself as a natural choice with the same cosmopolitan openness that I loved in the United States, Brazil, or England. That’s how Baccana was born, about ten years ago.
We remain in IT, supporting our clients in their digital transformation, in Monaco, but also abroad, in the United States, Europe, and Asia, in various sectors. We work with business software, e-commerce sites, applications, and virtual reality. Baccana is composed of six people in Monaco, and we have also kept our offices in Eastern Europe despite the geopolitical situation, as well as a small office in Chandigarh, India, with six employees. I also work as a consultant for companies, mainly in India, to help them understand the Western market. India and the West often perceive each other as two completely different worlds, which is rather true on both sides. My role is to create a bridge, advising companies in IT, Edtech, and railway engineering.
What unique aspect of your sector pushed you to integrate AI and how has it transformed your operations?
We’re in IT, Web, VR… It’s important to remember that we operate in an industrial sector that didn’t exist 30 years ago. It’s amazing to say that today, but it’s a reality. Joel Blesson and David Culot, my colleagues and friends, started before me, in the 90s. We’ve experienced many evolutions and revolutions but also disappointments. Technologies that everyone believed in disappeared overnight. To remain competitive, you have to be curious and constantly test.
Regarding AI, we launched a first trial in 2018-2019, but it ended in failure. In hindsight, the mistake we made at the time was treating AI as a turnkey solution, when it’s actually a tool. We had used it for content curation intended for social media, based on parameters related to luxury and mountains. The problem is that the segmentation quickly went off track, generating inappropriate associations like “psychiatry in the mountains,” which was not well received by our clients. So we put this project on hold, due to insufficient granularity.
It was with the arrival of ChatGPT 4 that we relaunched our tests, this time integrating AI as a tool and not as a complete solution. Quickly, we noticed considerable time savings, particularly on targeted content creation. Adoption proved to be rapid, both for us and for the entire market. AI doesn’t do the job better than us, but it allows us to produce a usable first draft almost instantly.
Time saved is the driving force behind the use of AI at Baccana. It’s now a tool like any other, alongside Photoshop, CMS, Office 365, or the coding languages we use. We’ve also deployed it for code validation, not to code for us, but to test and verify. Sometimes, when faced with a bug, you just need to run the code through AI to get the solution.
Before adopting AI, it’s essential to define the segments where we need it, then test the different available tools, comparing free and paid solutions.
How do you manage the issue of data storage?
The main challenge is related to the American Patriot Act and Cloud Act: any American technology or service implies potential accessibility of our data by the U.S. government. In Monaco, we have Monaco Cloud, a local storage solution adapted for sensitive data, particularly in the medical sector. I also recommend reading Frédéric Pierucci’s book, “The American Trap,” which tells his experience as a former executive of the French company Alstom. I met him during the Monaco Cloud presentation.
AI saves time, but consumes a lot of server resources, particularly GPUs. This is a problem in Monaco, where these already insufficient resources are mostly used by the government, leaving little room for AI for now. In the absence of sufficient local GPUs, there remain American solutions (AWS, Azure, Google), but we fall under the Patriot Act again. You have to be careful, but it obviously depends on the data being processed. In our case, we use it as a tool, and we don’t store sensitive data. It’s at the B2B level, however, that the question may arise.
What areas of AI application have you explored?
We use it for everything related to written content: SEO, creating targeted content for search engine optimization, relying on ChatGPT 4.o. For image and media, we use Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, or DALL-E. In the field of virtual reality, AI is taking up more and more space.
For voices, AI saves us an enormous amount of time. Personally, I sometimes do French voices for productions with partners in Ireland. Thanks to ElevenLabs, it’s possible to keep my voice, but make it speak perfectly Greek or Arabic, for example. It’s mind-blowing, and always validated by native speakers. It’s a wonderful tool, but one that must remain under human control.
We also use specialized AIs to streamline “scraping” projects, meaning recovering huge amounts of data on the web and transforming them into optimized databases to exploit them more effectively. Similarly, we use another AI to create minutes and action plans directly from remote meeting videos.
It’s in these particularly time-consuming areas that AI has the greatest impact on the efficiency of our daily work.
How did you overcome the cultural and human challenges when integrating AI?
After 30 years in IT, we’re used to being agile and open-minded. In our team, there’s a mix of generations, with fifty-somethings from Generation X, and members of Generation Z in their twenties. The connection between us happened naturally, because the “old-timers” that we are truly operate in a logic of transmission. My eldest son works with us, as do my friends David and Joël. The young people didn’t hesitate to embrace AI, listening to podcasts, and sharing the benefits with our clients, partners, and us, the “old-timers.”
There was no particular challenge, the transition was quick and organic. On the other hand, on the side of clients, partners, and colleagues, the ethical question has often been raised: does AI risk destroying jobs? The reality is that it replaces certain professions, as in the case of voices for our VR projects. However, it’s the story of humanity: professions evolve. Before running water, there were well diggers; before electricity, there were lamplighters. With AI, new opportunities and new professions are emerging. In July, I traveled to Hyderabad, India, and visited T-Hub, the world’s largest incubator, with between 450 and 650 startups permanently incubated, of which 25% are in the AI field.
We need to see AI as an evolution rather than an abrupt revolution. The disappearance of old professions is gradual, making way for innovations.
Have you noticed positive changes in the team, or even among your clients?
The introduction of AI really created excitement within the team, a bit like when you discover a new toy. The enthusiasm is palpable, and that’s precisely the mindset we need to keep. The team quickly realized that with these tools, they could accomplish long and/or complex tasks in record time. AI also brings a playful side, makes us laugh sometimes, like when my voice, generated by AI, expresses itself perfectly in Greek or Arabic. It opens up horizons and brings a certain breath of fresh air, because we see the results immediately, and they’re often impressive. It’s then up to us to add our personal touch.
This tool is fulfilling for the team, but you always have to keep a sense of proportion. We regularly ask ourselves the question: how far can we go in using these technologies? The boundary is still blurry, because the development of AI is progressing so rapidly that the limits are constantly being pushed.
On the client side, their priority is that it works well. However, there’s an interesting aspect regarding images, whether it’s websites or documents: very often, clients don’t have images available. Sometimes they provide us with images that aren’t copyright-free, which poses copyright problems. If a client is particularly attached to a specific image, we can modify it slightly with AI to circumvent copyright issues. Although this may raise ethical dilemmas, we comply with the client’s needs.
This raises legal questions, and I often explain to people how Americans approach these situations. Their approach remains very pioneering, like in the days of the conquest of the West: move forward, occupy the territory, and the rules will follow. In technology, this logic persists: whether it’s Microsoft, Google, or social networks, these giants move so fast that, very often, legislation struggles to keep up. Technology gains momentum before the legal framework is established, and these companies end up becoming de facto standards. This is the case today with AI: technology is advancing, the ground is already taken, and the law is several trains behind.
What advice would you give to SMEs hesitating to take the leap toward AI?
I like this Chinese proverb: “When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills.” Building a wall won’t stop the wind, whereas building a windmill allows you to benefit from it.
SMEs must seize AI to capture and exploit the winds of change, otherwise others will do it in their place and gain the advantage.
Interview conducted by Pascale Caron
