Sinequa appoints Jean Ferré Co-CEO and Acting CMO

Co-Founder and former CEO Ferré rejoins Sinequa to develop a generative AI Assistant ecosystem in a shared leadership capacity.

Sinequa, the organization’s enterprise search leader, has declared the appointment of Jean Ferré as Co-Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Ulf Zetterberg. The appointment strengthens the organization’s dedication to assisting enterprise-level clients in utilising generative AI to revolutionise human labour.

From 2005 to 2010, Ferré, who co-founded Sinequa with Alexandre Bilger, served as its CEO and president. He returns to Bilger’s team after nearly two decades of experience in global business management, strategy, and product marketing with regard to cloud and data platforms. As acting CMO, Ferré will be responsible for global business operations, global marketing initiatives, and partnerships. In the interim, Bilger will maintain his position as leader of Sinequa’s technology vision and strategy. They will collaborate in order to convert Sinequa’s search platforms into an ecosystem replete with AI-enabled assistants.

“The seismic market shift with large language models has generated wholly new work paradigms powered by enterprise search,” stated Alexandre Bilger, co-CEO of Sinequa. Sinequa is ideally situated to take advantage of this transition, and our AI-powered offerings will be revolutionised by Jean Ferré’s profound technical knowledge and track record of fostering ecosystem expansion and team leadership. I am delighted to have him back at Sinequa, where I anticipate utilising his prior experience to advance the Sinequa Assistant ecosystem and generate benefits for our partners, customers, and other participants in the ecosystem.

Ferré’s tenure as Co-CEO is complemented by more than two decades of experience in technical leadership and international business administration. Most recently, he joined Sinequa after serving as Chief Innovation, Marketing, and Strategy Officer at Vantiva. Prior to that, Ferré held the position of CDO and Executive Vice President, SBU Digital Services at IN Groupe. His previous positions at Thales included general manager and vice president, where he oversaw engineering, manufacturing, and R&D sites in Europe, India, the United States, and China. Additionally, he was a director at The Boston Consulting Group and Microsoft, where his most recent responsibility was the worldwide development of ISV co-selling programmes for Azure.

“I am honoured that Alexandre Bilger and Sinequa’s shareholders have placed their confidence in me to serve as Co-CEO. Sinequa has carved out a distinct market niche in the application of AI-driven enterprise search to specific industry verticals. The distinct qualities of scalability, security, and relevance exhibited by Sinequa’s clientele—including prominent innovators worldwide operating in highly complex, data-centric sectors—attest to the company’s ability to maintain their loyalty. By integrating generative AI with secure Neural Search at scale from Sinequa, our clients are revolutionising the boundaries of possibility in knowledge-intensive sectors including manufacturing, life sciences, finance, and legal. Jean Ferré, co-CEO of Sinequa, added, “I am thrilled to co-lead alongside Alexandre and to rejoin Sinequa’s incredible talent on this voyage.”

In the preceding months, Sinequa has achieved the status of a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Knowledge Discovery Software 2023 Vendor Assessment and commenced a strategic partnership with Axient LLC (Axient), a provider of systems integration services for the national security, civil, commercial, and defence space sectors in the United States. Furthermore, it has strengthened its alliance with Google Cloud by incorporating its burgeoning generative AI functionalities into Sinequa’s repertoire.