Selling your flat and your car is one way to make a business plan feel less theoretical. Stanislas Bocquet did both to help finance the venture that became PALO IT. Before committing his assets, though, he had done something rather less cinematic: he had asked people to talk.
He contacted 130 technology executives and decision makers. More than 20 wanted a conversation within a day; over five months, he met more than 60. The sequence matters. Here was a prospective founder willing to put his own property behind an idea, but also willing to let strangers have a good look at it first.
There is an appealing tension there. Entrepreneurship rewards conviction. Selling services requires listening. Bocquet’s career sits between those two demands, with a recurring interest in how a company organizes its people. Today he is the founder and CEO of a consultancy working across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. The technology has moved on to AI. The awkward organizational questions have travelled remarkably well.
A sales career, with the doors open
Bocquet’s working life began well before PALO IT’s founding in 2009. His career includes co-founding Will Up from 1999 to 2001, a senior consulting role at Trinova Hub from 2001 to 2002, and commercial leadership at Valtech from 2002 to 2008. He also completed an HEC Executive MBA, with his education record listing 2006 to 2008.
Those jobs put him close to the practical mechanics of a technology business: winning customers, negotiating contracts, coordinating teams and making a proposal survive contact with a budget. These are useful qualifications for someone who would later spend much of his time talking about transformation. A contract has a way of asking for the details.
His professional background also complicates the familiar founder portrait. The story here runs through business development and the organization of delivery. Software may be the product, but persuading people to work together is part of the craft. A persuasive presentation can open a door. Keeping the project moving requires another set of habits altogether.
Hong Kong made the map larger
By 2017, Bocquet was describing Hong Kong as a place where an entrepreneur could reach decision makers quickly and operate within a straightforward regulatory environment. He spoke about the importance of being inside an ecosystem drawing startups from mainland China and the rest of Asia. His description of PALO IT emphasized an international company with talent coming from many places.
For a services founder, geography presents an interesting test. Opening an office is a visible event. Learning which assumptions need to change when the office opens takes longer. Customers bring local expectations; colleagues bring different experience. An international business has to make those differences useful while giving its teams enough common ground to deliver.
Bocquet participated in that wider commercial community too. He served on the board of the French Chamber in Hong Kong from 2018 to 2022. His public record also includes an ambassador and sponsor role with Sparknews during those years, and an advisory board role at the World Economic Forum beginning in May 2023. These connections place him among people working on trade, entrepreneurship and the social consequences of business.
The strategy meeting gets 200 invitations
One revealing episode involved inviting 200 employees from around the world to contribute their personal ambitions and unconventional ideas to the company’s direction. Some of those contributions helped reshape its business model. The exercise appears in a 2021 examination of how smaller and midsized businesses prepare for the future.
A request for ideas can be a pleasant afternoon with stationery. It becomes a different proposition when suggestions alter what the company does. The episode gives substance to Bocquet’s interest in participation: people doing the work were invited into the discussion about where that work should lead.
His public position on leadership puts weight on authenticity and empathy. Shared values are supposed to guide both leaders and employees. That is a demanding claim for any growing consultancy, because a culture has to survive the ordinary decisions that never make it into an announcement: who gets heard, how disagreement is handled, and what happens when a delivery date becomes uncomfortable.
There is no shortcut in that argument. A founder can announce a principle once. Colleagues encounter it repeatedly, through decisions. Bocquet’s emphasis on the organization suggests he understands that the business itself is an ongoing design project, with rather more opinions involved than a software interface.
“AI is only as effective as the data it’s making use of.”
Stanislas Bocquet, on AI and sustainability
Barcelona, with room for a family
In 2023, Bocquet explained why he had settled in Barcelona after years in Hong Kong. He liked the city’s energy, the sea and the opportunities for mountain sports. He wanted his children to discover another culture. Family roots in different parts of Spain had already given him opportunities to know the country.
Barcelona’s connections and technology community were part of the attraction as well. His account combines a business ecosystem with a place to live. The mountain matters alongside the meeting. There is something usefully ordinary about that explanation from a founder whose professional vocabulary often deals in global change.
PALO IT was entering Spain that year, with a network then described as more than 700 professionals. Bocquet connected the expansion to the country’s relationship with Latin America and its pool of talent. For him, moving between places had become a way to encounter different possibilities for both work and family life.
The traveller’s obligation
Bocquet has said he has visited more than 100 countries. He connects those experiences to wanting to protect the places he has seen so future generations can enjoy them. Travel, in his telling, creates a sense of obligation. A collection of destinations becomes a reason to care about what business leaves behind.
He has also invested in more than 15 startups. That experience gives his discussion of technology another practical dimension: ideas need organizations and resources to become useful. His stated optimism rests on the choices people make about technology and information, including their capacity to address environmental problems.
In 2023, he set out an ambition for half of PALO IT’s business to come from positive impact projects by 2025. That was a target, with a date attached. It is best read as the direction he wanted the company to take. The ambition also makes the discussion more concrete: purpose has implications for which work a consultancy chooses to pursue.
His AI argument follows a similar line. Useful environmental applications depend on the quality and breadth of their data. He has called for collaboration among researchers, businesses and governments. Behind that position is a practical dependency: the software team needs knowledge, access and cooperation that may sit outside its own organization.
The people take the larger slice
In March 2026, PALO IT announced its acquisition of Bangcast, a specialist in AI training. The move added teaching and adoption expertise to a company already building software with AI. Bocquet described customers asking which organizational models would allow them to deploy the technology effectively. The purchase put resources behind that question.
The company explains its approach through a 10-20-70 rule: data and algorithms account for 10 percent of successful AI adoption, technology for 20 percent, and managing change for 70 percent. Treat those proportions as its management framework, rather than a universal measurement. The allocation is nevertheless revealing. The largest share belongs to the work of helping an organization change.
Where the work goes
A framework for adoption, not a measured breakdown of every project.
That emphasis gives Bocquet’s current chapter a recognizable connection to the earlier one. Better tools still require people to reconsider their routines, responsibilities and expectations. The technical possibility arrives with a management assignment attached. It is unlikely to be completed simply by giving everyone a new login.
There is a substantial engineering business alongside the training. PALO IT’s Gen-e2 approach brings AI into software delivery, and GitHub named the firm its 2025 APAC Services and Channel Partner of the Year. That award belongs to the company and its teams. It gives a specific marker of the partner relationships surrounding Bocquet’s latest work.
A question that survives the upgrade
In a recent public post, Bocquet described looking back across 30 enterprise AI projects. His emphasis fell on context, controls and governance around the model. He distinguished between an error inside a developer’s working environment and an error in cloud infrastructure, where the consequences can extend further.
It is a telling place for his attention to land. The public excitement around AI often gathers around what a model can produce. Bocquet is talking about the conditions under which an enterprise can use it. Training, shared context and responsibility are less theatrical than a demonstration. They also help determine what happens after the applause.
His career offers a persistent question: what must change in the organization for a technology to be useful? It connects customer conversations, invitations to employees, environmental ambitions and the acquisition of a training business. The answer keeps requiring other people. For a founder who once sold his own flat to get started, that is a considerable expansion of the original plan.