OpenAI Names Former Uber France Chief Laureline Serieys to Lead France and Southern Europe

OpenAI has appointed Laureline Serieys, the former general manager of Uber France, to run its business in France and Southern Europe, Stratégies reported on October 21. She starts on November 9 and will report to Emmanuel Marill, OpenAI’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Stratégies reads the choice as a sign that OpenAI is anchoring more of its European leadership in Paris.

In its announcement, OpenAI said Serieys will build relationships with users, business customers, developers, partners and institutions, and help individuals and organisations adopt AI. A 2005 graduate of ESSEC, she began as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, worked on retail at Google from 2011 to 2016, then moved to Crédit Agricole until 2019 before joining Uber, where she led the Jump bike-rental service and became general manager of Uber France in 2020.

The company describes France as one of its main European markets and among the top ten countries in the world for weekly use of both ChatGPT and its API. OpenAI now employs 50 people in France and says it will keep hiring. Paris also hosts its largest Forward Deployed Engineering team in the EMEA region, engineers who work directly with clients to build OpenAI models into their operations.

What it means in practice

Stratégies notes that the profile combines commercial experience with long practice in dealing with authorities, a useful mix for a company facing questions about technological sovereignty. OpenAI is competing for French customers with Anthropic, with Google’s Gemini and with domestic champions such as Mistral, whose record funding round made it the flagship of the sovereign-AI argument. It is also building an advertising business in Europe after launching ChatGPT Ads last month, a sensitive subject for publishers who have watched their audiences shrink as AI-generated answers spread.

For French companies, a senior local executive may mean more direct negotiation over enterprise contracts, data location and public-sector deals. For workers, wider adoption sharpens the questions raised by the Banque de France study on youth hiring in AI-exposed jobs.

What to watch: whether OpenAI announces French data-hosting or public-sector agreements under Serieys, how quickly its Paris headcount grows beyond 50, and how ChatGPT Ads is received by French advertisers and regulators.