Director of AI and Innovation, Republic of Benin
Making innovationa public servicethat works
I am Director of AI and Innovation at Benin's Ministry of Digital Transformation and Innovation, in charge of the national artificial intelligence strategy. An AI engineer, author and teacher, I work to make sure AI is understood and built in Benin too.
Three crafts,
one conviction.
From startup
to government.
Bio and photos, EN and FR- 2026Director of AI and InnovationToday
Ministry of Digital Transformation and Innovation. In charge of the national artificial intelligence strategy.
- 2024Head of Data & AI, ASIN
Monitoring of the national AI strategy, Benin's Open Data platform, GPT-BJ, launch of JaimeMaLangue.
- 2022AI consultant and trainer, DataKev
Deep Learning course on Udemy, first GPT-BJ prototype, teaching at master's level.
- 2021Data Scientist, MTN Benin
Customer satisfaction, churn prediction, data governance. In parallel, Data Science mentor at OpenClassrooms until 2023.
- 2019Machine Learning Engineer, Konta
Casablanca. Automated data extraction on more than 40,000 invoices.
The book, published 21 July 2026, in French
Construire un LLM de zéro
From mathematics to AI agents. Going from “I use an assistant” to “I understand how one is built”, on a simple free Colab notebook.
- Autograd
- Attention
- Transformer
- Post-training
- AI agents
On stage.
- AI and the Global SouthHow to compress a century of progress into a decade.
- AI in public serviceWhat works, what fails, and why.
- Building a talent ecosystemAI Olympiads, communities, African languages.
- Understanding LLMs from the insideThe stage version of the book, for technical audiences.
Publications.
- Participatory Research for Low-Resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African LanguagesMasakhane, Findings of EMNLP 2020
- Masakhane, Machine Translation for AfricaMasakhane, ICLR AfricaNLP Workshop 2020
- AI4D, African Language ProgramAI4D Language Program, AfricaNLP Workshop 2021
- The UCD System for the 2018 FEMH Voice Data ChallengeK. Degila et al., IEEE Big Data 2018
Courses.
Off the clock, I play tennis.
A rally is built shot by shot, like a project. Try to hold your own against me: move your mouse or finger across the court.
You 0, Kévin 0Longest rally: 0 shots
Notes and essays, in French.
All articlesL'IA n'attendra pas que nous soyons prêts
La machine à vapeur a mis quatre-vingts ans à nous atteindre, ChatGPT quelques mois. Pour les pays du Sud, l'enjeu n'est pas la superintelligence mais l'accès à l'expertise rare.
I don't have any big goal in 2026. I just want my Attention back
In 2026, instead of chasing bigger goals, I’m running small experiments to reclaim my attention, my calm, and the ability to think deeply in a world of constant noise.
Contact me
The easiest way is to message me on LinkedIn.
Message me on LinkedInEvent organiser or journalist? Bio and photos to download, in English and French.
Student or changing careers? Most answers are already in the videos and the book, both in French. See the free courses. A game of tennis? That's negotiable.