CBTW Appoints Laurent DeSegur as Group Chief AI Officer

Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, September 8th, 2026, FinanceWire

This appointment brings CBTW’s AI work under a single leader as clients push from pilots into production

CBTW (Collaboration Betters The World), a global technology services firm of more than 2,000 experts serving over 1,000 clients across 21 countries and three continents, today announced the appointment of Laurent DeSegur as Group Chief AI Officer, effective 1 September 2026. 

As Group Chief AI Officer, Laurent will lead a federated Group AI function across CBTW’s 21 countries, owning the firm’s Group AI strategy, its catalogue of proprietary AI offers, its AI partnerships and its AI governance. Delivery and client ownership stay where they belong, with CBTW’s regional teams and service lines. 

The offers are the part clients see: packaged agentic, retrieval and orchestration solutions built on the client data CBTW already works with, and AI governance offered as a service to organisations that have to be able to show a regulator how a system reaches a decision.

Based in New York, Laurent will work across all three of CBTW’s continents - the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. He works in English, French and Italian. 

The move reflects CBTW’s reading of the market: an AI system is only ever as good as the data it runs on, and the work of knowing where a client’s data lives, what it means, and where it breaks is what separates AI that can be run from AI that can only be demonstrated. That data work has been CBTW’s ground for years. The new function will turn that foundation into deployable AI offers, enabling clients in each market to draw on proven capabilities and expertise from across CBTW’s global network.

“Clients are past the demonstration stage and are asking harder questions: can you run this, can you show me the ROI, will it survive an audit,” said Jeremy Jacquet, CBTW Founder & CEO. “Answering those is now one job with one owner across the whole group, and Laurent has both the mandate and the authority to do it.” 

Laurent brings three decades of engineering leadership. He built consumer products at scale - search at Netflix, mobile payments at PayPal and, as Vice President of Engineering at Walmart eCommerce, the retailer’s next-generation online and in-store customer experience, where he open-sourced Electrode, a React and Node.js application platform. He has spent the last eight years in banking: at National Australia Bank, as General Manager, Digital and Assisted Channels, he moved the bank’s contact-centre technology to the cloud for 4,000 bankers; he joins CBTW from JPMorgan Chase, where, as Managing Director, Voice Technology, he led the AI-driven voice and chat platforms serving the bank’s customers and employees in real time, with security and compliance built in from the outset. He writes and publishes open-source work on runtime safety for autonomous AI agents and has spoken at AWS re: Invent.

That combination - consumer scale, then AI in front of bank customers under banking-grade regulatory constraint - is the profile CBTW went looking for. Financial services, insurance and healthcare are where the firm sees the clearest demand for AI that can be audited as well as demonstrated.

Beyond regulated industries, CBTW sees growing demand for AI that accelerates product delivery, strengthens engineering quality and helps clients build capabilities they can ultimately own, including through nearshore delivery centres.

“Enterprises do not have an AI ideas problem. They have a production problem,” said Laurent. “I have spent years putting AI in front of bank customers, on the phone and in chat, where every answer is on the record. Getting an agent from a convincing demo to something a risk committee will approve is a governance and data engineering challenge before it is a model challenge. CBTW is already inside its clients’ data at depth. That gives us a unique foundation to turn AI ambition into production reality at scale - and that is what makes this role so exciting.” 

ABOUT CBTW

CBTW (Collaboration Betters The World) is a global technology services firm bringing together more than 2,000 experts across 21 countries and three continents, serving over 1,000 clients. CBTW combines strategy, data, software engineering, cloud, and AI to help organisations turn technology into measurable business outcomes. 

Website: cbtw.tech

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