About AIssential

What We Do

AI is discussed everywhere. Far fewer can say what it changed in their own operation. Among French companies of 50 to 249 people, 31% use any AI at all (INSEE, 11,000 firms) — and of those that adopted it, 94% use it to optimise what already exists rather than to grow the business (Bpifrance Le Lab, 387 adopters). The tools work fine — the work around them never changed shape.

The problem was never the model. It's that the work never changed, and the knowledge an operation runs on sits in two or three people's heads and in documents that no longer match what people do — where no model can reach it. A newer model does not fix work that stayed the same.

So we start with one workflow. Bring us the place AI should be paying off — or find one with us. We operationalize your own knowledge into it, measure the result against an honest baseline, and hand you a go/no-go plus the operating model to scale it — then build it out and hand it over. Priced per project, by request.

Implementation has never been faster. Writing code that stays maintainable is still hard work — but it isn't why most AI fails to earn its keep. That happens in everything around it.

Who's Behind It

Engagements are led personally by Julien Martin, PhD in AI (Sorbonne / Inria), with 20 years spent building AI systems inside expert workflows:

• ICIJ — the investigative network behind the Panama Papers. Helped design DataShare, a privacy-preserving search engine that let journalists find and cite evidence across borders.
• Imaginatio — an augmented legal word processor that surfaced, in the margin, the exact texts a document cited as you read it.
• Production studios — R&D leadership on CG and VFX pipelines, putting AI into the tools artists already use.
• A PhD at Inria / Sorbonne in constraint programming and NLP, and an Inria–CNIL distinguished-paper award.

The thread never changed: software as a prosthetic for expert judgment — grounded in real sources, embedded in the workflow, and honest about what it knows. That's the same principle behind Counsel, and behind the work we do inside your operation.

Counsel — our self-serve decision aid

Counsel is the software side of the same method, and you can use it without talking to us. Weighing a specific AI decision? Counsel argues a position on your call, with every claim quoted from a real source — never generated. 14 days free, no card; then €99/mo Solo for every decision you bring.

We publish public verdicts on the calls leadership teams are weighing now, so you can see exactly what Counsel produces before you get in touch.

Counsel reads 800+ trusted sources — research institutions, industry publications, independent blogs and media, including arXiv, Hugging Face, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, MIT, Stanford and The Gradient — across research papers, industry analysis, tutorials, open-source releases, podcasts and expert commentary. You set your role and interests on the free tier; on Pro, you share the decisions on your plate and each one is argued back at you as new evidence lands.

The Company

AIssential is a product of Magma, a French technology company registered in Évry, France (SIRET: 81968546200015).

For legal and corporate information, see our Legal Notice.

Get in Touch

Have a workflow where AI should be paying off? That's the conversation we want.

Visit our Contact page or email us directly at contact@aissential.tech.