1. In your view, what is the next major innovation or evolution in real estate and cities that you are most looking forward to?
I believe the next major evolution, one that we are already beginning to observe, concerns the way the city functions as a whole. This transformation is multi-layered, profound, and its consequences for real estate are considerable.
Today, we must reconcile several major shifts. The first is obvious, fewer people go to the office on a daily basis. This is partly due to remote work, but also to a more challenging economic environment that has mechanically reduced demand for traditional office space.
The second shift relates to how people live. Households are changing, there are fewer children, smaller units, and, importantly, a gradual weakening of intergenerational and intragenerational interactions. This raises a genuine social question, how do we recreate connections and rebuild interactions within the city?
Finally, there is the broader lifestyle issue. Spending one hour or more commuting each day is no longer widely accepted. Some people are still constrained to do so, of course, but it is no longer considered a desirable model.
Real estate innovation therefore lies in our ability to design multi-use assets capable of simultaneously addressing work, housing, services, and social life. Places where individuals can find a coherent balance between where and how they work, where and how they live, and the human and social environment in which they evolve.
2. On which topics have younger members of your teams led you to rethink your way of thinking or working?
Younger members of our teams have led me to fundamentally rethink my perception of the relationship between work and place.
For a long time, office real estate was built around an implicit assumption, commuting daily to a centralized location was the norm. Younger generations clearly challenge this model. They expect greater flexibility, more meaning in the way spaces are used, and stronger coherence between professional and personal life. This has led me to reconsider certain reflexes, particularly the idea that an asset’s performance is primarily measured by its occupancy rate or its location.
They have also influenced my thinking regarding user experience. Where we traditionally thought in terms of square meters, yield, or asset typology, they think in terms of quality of life, services, mixed-use environments, and accessibility. This perspective has pushed me to integrate the question of real, everyday usage much earlier and more systematically into the design phase of our projects.
In practical terms, this has translated into a more collaborative and open working approach. I deliberately use junior profiles as genuine sparring partners, I test the relevance of our concepts with them, and I listen to their objections, expectations, and intuitions. They provide extremely valuable early signals about upcoming societal shifts.
Ultimately, they compel us to think longer term. They will be tomorrow’s primary users, decision-makers, and investors in the market. Listening to them today is a way to ensure that the assets we develop remain relevant ten or fifteen years from now.
3. Which part of your activity do you believe artificial intelligence will have the most difficulty replacing?
It is interesting to answer this question in reverse. Artificial intelligence can already, and will increasingly, intervene in many aspects of our business, functional design, space organization, and technical optimization, provided it is given the right instructions.
However, what AI will likely never replace is precisely the exercise of defining those instructions. Determining the nature of a project, the relevance of a specific mix of uses, and the alignment between a real estate concept and the life, work, and social expectations of a given population.
AI will also help us improve environmental performance, particularly in a context where we aim to build the city upon itself, limit land artificialization, and optimize energy usage, which has become more expensive and more complex to produce.
But human intelligence will remain indispensable to arbitrate, decide, and give meaning to projects. Once those strategic choices are made, AI can become an exceptional execution tool.
4. Looking back on your career, which professional decision has had the greatest long-term impact, even though it was not obvious at the time?
At the beginning of my career, I worked in real estate development between 1990 and 1997. In 1997, I decided to leave that field, despite being successful in it, to move into asset management, first with Archon and later with Morgan Stanley.
At the time, asset management was still an emerging discipline. Anglo-Saxon funds were beginning to structure these approaches, but nothing was obvious. Leaving development to add a much stronger financial dimension to my career was a difficult decision. I clearly remember several sleepless nights after leaving Bouygues Immobilier, wondering whether I had made a major mistake.
With hindsight, that decision shaped the rest of my career. It later allowed me to lead Carrefour Property and, most importantly, to head European real estate investments for ADIA starting in 2012.
This choice enabled me to combine two essential dimensions, brick and mortar, meaning the concrete creation and operational management of projects, and financial analysis. Today, this combination may seem obvious, but in 1997, it was far from it.
Closing Statement
Real estate is a fascinating industry because it combines financial dimensions with very concrete and physical realities, real estate is a tangible object, not an abstract concept, but also, and above all, deeply human dimensions.
Designing and managing real estate projects ultimately means managing human relationships in a 360-degree way. And that human dimension, in my view, remains absolutely central and irreplaceable.
