The IT Circle: Interview with Erwan Conq, CIO Retail France at ENGIE

The IT Cirlce: Erwan Conq, CIO Retail France at ENGIE.

TL;DR In this conversation, Erwan Conq shares lessons from 30+ years in IT and 11 years at ENGIE Retail France, where IT underpins operations for millions of consumers. He explains why listening is the first skill for any technologist, how the energy transition is pushing companies from client-centric to client-data-centric architectures, and why AI will shift from large general models to specialised agents orchestrated by meta-agents. He argues that visibility should be strict where customer data is at stake and pragmatic elsewhere, and that IT communication rests on two pillars: operational excellence and fluency in business outcomes. Looking ahead, he sees simpler, more data-driven systems, multicloud as a strategic necessity, and IT leaders who set long-term trajectories rather than only shipping projects.

What advice would you give to someone starting out in IT in 2025?

Start by listening. Your primary tool is your ears, connected to your brain. Business teams are focused on execution and do not always see how their work maps to company-level strategy. Your job is to understand the real drivers of the business, anticipate needs, and look farther ahead as change accelerates. Clear expression matters, but deep listening comes first.

💡 “The first tool in IT is listening. Understand the business intent behind requests, not only the request itself.”

Which IT project are you most proud of, or that challenged you most?

The most challenging initiatives are those that question the status quo and force you to project different future usages. Energy is undergoing a structural shift: electricity consumption is set to double, renewables introduce price and availability variability, and margins are thin. The consequence is a move from client-centric systems to client-data-centric systems. With cloud-scale storage and compute decoupled, and with AI acceleration, tomorrow’s information systems will be organised around data rather than monolithic applications. That opens the door to hybrid and multi-cloud strategies that are difficult today but will become feasible as architectures simplify.

💡 “Our systems are evolving from client-centric to client-data-centric. Data is the new backbone, not the application.”

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How will AI impact the management of complex SaaS environments?

Expect two complementary models. Large general models will exist, but the sustainable path is specialised agents trained on specific corpora, orchestrated by meta-agents. AI should accelerate and simplify processes rather than replace them entirely. Companies must preserve a minimum of process to keep outcomes predictable, because predictability is what businesses sell. The practical stack looks like highly scalable data lakehouse platforms, with serverless process layers animated by AI to remove toil while avoiding hallucinations.

💡 “Use AI to speed up well-designed processes. Predictable outcomes still require processes.”

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How have application adoption and usage evolved over your career?

From a world without internet or email to consumer-grade UX at work, adoption barriers have dropped. Users are more autonomous and often adopt redundant tools outside the official stack. The CIO’s role is to segment: govern what touches customer data and critical flows, and avoid over-regulating harmless usage that fuels creativity. Instrumentation can flood you with signals; the value is deciding what must be controlled and what should remain flexible.

Why is visibility so important for security and compliance?

Two schools exist. Some try to control everything down to each purchase line, which collapses under volume. The pragmatic view is to be uncompromising where customer data is involved and more relaxed elsewhere. A minor third-party leak of old addresses created headlines despite limited impact, which shows why unknown apps holding customer data are unacceptable. Visibility is therefore about risk-based governance, not counting every app for its own sake.

💡 “Do not try to control everything. Be absolute on customer data, pragmatic on the rest.”

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What are best practices for IT communication with the business?

Agility helped establish productive rituals, but the foundation has two pillars. First, operations must work. First it works. If email is down, nobody will listen to your AI roadmap. Second, IT must speak the language of the business and map technology choices to value chains and outcomes. Organisationally, combine technology expertise with product or program units aligned to business value streams, then assemble multidisciplinary teams.

💡 “Operational excellence plus business fluency. Without both, communication does not stick.”

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What will the CIO role look like in five to ten years?

The role becomes even more strategic as IT drives a larger share of operations and as today’s choices lock in tomorrow’s options. Systems will simplify compared with pre-cloud complexity, even if new risks emerge around data sharing and GDPR. Multicloud will be a strategic lever to manage costs and dependency. Availability concerns will fade relative to data governance and portability.

How do you see IT education and continuous learning?

The core skill is the ability to learn and to stay curious. Technology and roles change continuously; the essence of our job is movement. Schools should cultivate broad culture and the capacity to connect technology evolution to business impact. Coding may be easier, but understanding what to build, why it matters, and how to steer change will always be valuable.

Build or buy: what is the trend?

Expect a shift toward building more on top of strong data foundations. Modern lakehouse platforms let you run BI and transactional workloads on the same substrate and keep data governable and portable. Rather than locking processes inside monolithic ERP silos, companies will compose simpler, serverless processes directly on governed data, with AI assisting execution. Buy robust cloud and data primitives, then build lightweight processes where you create differentiation.

💡 “Buy the foundations. Build the differentiating processes on governed, portable data.”

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Closing thought

The CIO’s job is to chart long-term trajectories, connect business drivers with evolving technical capabilities, and decide where to be strict and where to stay permissive. Listen first, simplify architectures around data, govern what truly matters, and communicate outcomes in business terms.

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