Data science expert Lucas Genton joins Visium to enhance the commercial AI depth of its speciality chemicals work

When Autodesk recruited Lucas Genton to build data science for its sales organisation, they made sure he lived and breathed sales. His desk was located squarely in the middle of the sales hub, and he reported directly to the sales lead. The underlying logic was irrefutable: before Lucas could build anything useful for the representatives, he had to understand their job – through and through.

That working arrangement goes a long way towards explaining what makes Lucas such a valuable and noteworthy addition to the Visium team. To date, he has spent more than 13 years building machine learning and AI products for large enterprises, first at HP and then for eight years at Autodesk, where he established the sales data-science practice from scratch. By the end of his time with the firm, he was leading a global Sales Data Science & Analytics team embedded within revenue operations. His systems ran in production forecasting, optimisation, analytics, and, more recently, agentic AI, meaning software that can carry out multi-step tasks with a degree of autonomy.

Lucas has now joined Visium as Staff AI Engineer. In his new role, he applies his experience building AI products to help Specialty Chemicals companies use AI for formula optimization.

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Bringing models closer to those who use them

Leaders of speciality chemicals firms have seen plenty of AI demos. The real question is what happens after the decision to buy, when a newly installed AI system must hold up inside a regulated workflow, and the people who own that workflow have to decide whether or not they can truly rely on it.

Lucas has spent his career working at the point where the rubber meets the road. He began as a hands-on data scientist, then moved into leading teams, and finally into business strategy and finance partnering – but he never stopped writing code. That career arc has made him perfectly comfortable moving between three teams that often speak very different languages: executive, business, and engineering. Much of the value that Lucas can offer lies in translating ideas and concepts between these three very different views of the same organisational reality.

"I care about making AI genuinely useful rather than building technology for its own sake," he says. In other words, Lucas feels that instead of chasing the latest hype, it’s more important to actually get things done. 

What Lucas brings to the table is enterprise-scale experience of taking AI beyond the prototype and into daily use, and a highly productive habit of starting with the person whose work AI is supposed to change. 

Learning to do more with less

Lucas also co-founded Sherpa GTM, an AI go-to-market platform for sales and marketing teams. Customer targeting usually starts with basic firmographics: company size, sector, location. Sherpa used AI agents to go one step further, identifying the companies whose problems most closely matched the one that a seller can actually solve.

The venture gave Lucas first-hand experience of shipping a valuable product with limited resources – a radically different discipline from running a team within a major enterprise.

Why Visium, why now?

Above all, Lucas was drawn to Visium's growth story: a highly skilled team built from scratch that became expert in life sciences, which he describes as "a hard domain." Now, Lucas’ ambition is to create products and work on major transformational projects that change how clients do business. With that in mind,he particularly likes where his new role sits within the Visium operation: "I love being at the edge, between client-facing work and challenging technical problems."

Lucas is particularly interested in regulated industries such as pharma, chemicals, and manufacturing, where the business impact of AI can be measured in the real world.

Running 80km of trail on a cold winter’s night

A French national, Lucas has made his home in Barcelona for 15 years, using that base to build a career that spans three countries and multiple business cultures. He is the father of three young daughters. When he finds the time, he reads history books, plays historical strategy games, and seeks out science fiction and fantasy authors who combine vivid imagination with an instinct for strong storytelling.

Lucas is also a keen trail runner, most often following routes in the Catalan Hills. His longest race so far was a mountain marathon that included 2,200 metres of climbing. His next objective will probably be the SaintéLyon, an 80-kilometre (50-mile) race that is run through the dark of a chilly December night. 

"I love the feeling of exhaustion, combined with the views and relaxing feel of being out on a trail," he says.

A nocturnal ultramarathon demands diligent preparation, intelligent pacing, and the willingness to keep going long after the initial novelty has worn off. In that sense, then, it is rather like enterprise AI.

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