ESSEC names Abdelmounaim Derraz as new executive director of the ESSEC Metalab

Abdelmounaim Derraz, the executive director of the ESSEC Master’s in Data Sciences & Business Analytics, is now also the executive director of the ESSEC Metalab, a think tank dedicated to data, artificial intelligence, and their societal impact. Data and artificial intelligence are part of ESSEC’s strategy, which centers our society’s major challenges in our approach to pedagogy and research.

“The government has invested 2 billion euros in AI via the France 2030 plan, and the ambition of the Metalab is to help society better understand and use the power of data to help organizations and the public make informed, ethical decisions. Major developments in generative AI have accelerated global awareness of related issues, with language and image models available to all thanks to OpenAI and reasoning models that are still in the confidential phase.

In joining the ESSEC Metalab, I’m joining a community made up of students, researchers, and ESSEC’s corporate partners, all working together for an ethical adoption of data and artificial intelligence technologies,” states Abdelmounaim Derraz.

Derraz is a graduate of Télécom Paris, receiving a degree in applied mathematics and financial engineering in 2013. He started his career as a consultant at Ekimetrics, an industry leader in AI-based marketing solutions.

Before joining ESSEC, he helped companies work on their business strategies and operating models using data science and artificial intelligence. He worked with clients from all over the world in a variety of sectors (banking and insurance, automobile, luxury, entertainment, retail), offering AI solutions for asset management, sales prediction, pricing strategies, measuring marketing impact and customer journey automation. He also explored potential uses of new blockchain technologies by assessing their impact on asset management for individual and institutional investors. He worked with key industry representatives and their networks to advance decentralized applications and assess their role in society and the economy.

He joined ESSEC in 2017, teaching data science for business for five years. In 2022, he took over as executive director of the Master in Data Sciences & Business Analytics (ESSEC and CentraleSupélec), now becoming executive director of the ESSEC Metalab in 2024.