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Every business gets wrinkles eventually, so what do you do about them? That was the question at the heart of a lively Euronews event at VivaTech looking at longevity both in personal and professional life.
The conversation turned personal pretty quickly, with Delphine Viguier, L’Oréal’s Chief Innovation and Prospective Officer, joking that “I have much more wrinkles than my business plan”.
She said that when the signs of age do show up, either in your skin or in your strategy, the response is the same: change your habits. For her, that means oral supplements, sunscreen, anti-aging products and, for companies, it means boosting innovation, opening up to outside ideas and rediscovering creativity.
For Pauline Adam-Kalfon, Chief Innovation and Impact Officer at PwC France and Maghreb, the prescription for an aging business is direct.
“Reinvention starts with subtraction,” she said. Her advice: kill whatever in your business no longer creates differentiated value, rather than just piling up new projects.
Both women agreed that data is the antidote to acting on every passing fad. At L’Oréal, Viguier said the sheer scale of the company’s data, now sharpened by AI, lets her team spot patterns in what has worked and what hasn’t so as “not to repeat the same mistakes.”
Her rule of thumb in a fast-moving beauty market is that it is fine to chase short, trend-based wins as long as you do not take your eye off the long-term product lines that are the bedrock of your company.
Adam-Kalfon brought numbers from PwC’s own research into how companies use AI, showing that just 20% of companies her consultancy surveyed are capturing 74% of the value AI is generating, with the best performers seeing productivity or revenue gains over seven times higher than everyone else.
Closing that gap, she said, comes down to a kind of playbook — basically, one should use AI to drive growth, not just efficiency, and when experiments work, scale them quickly.
The other tip, which both experts shared, was that it is good to work with and understand people with different backgrounds from outside your usual group, both in your personal life and business affairs.
For Viguier, such diversity is the key to a good prevention strategy. “It’s like in biology,” she argues. “When you have mixed origins, you have better vitality.”
When something does go wrong, then Adam-Kalfon says the trouble is rarely cosmetic. It tends to sit in three places: a loss of relevance in what you are offering customers, erosion of margins in the operating model, and a slowdown in decision-making that leaves a company too slow to react.
It was a fittingly hands-on and practical session at VivaTech, with L’Oréal demonstrating its LED face mask, designed to rejuvenate skin at a cellular level, while PwC showcased their AI fitness application, which offers an instant health check for businesses wanting to know where they stand with the world’s biggest technology trend.
Neither guest pretended longevity would be easy.
There were no miracle creams or AI shortcuts on offer, personally or professionally, just a shared belief that paying close attention to your own data, habits and energy levels is what keeps you, and your business, in the game for longer.