Olivier Verdin

Olivier Verdin's public voice centers on a single conviction stated repeatedly in different forms: the mechanics of discovery are shifting from stores to AI systems, and whoever adapts first will win. "AI is becoming a new discovery layer for games" , he writes, and elsewhere frames the same idea for apps more broadly: "AI visibility is becoming a new frontier for app growth" . He is precise about what has changed in user behavior, users no longer just search app stores or Google, they ask ChatGPT "What is the best streaming app?" or "Which app should I use to watch movies?" , and he treats this as a strategic inflection point rather than a passing trend, tying it directly to product launches at AppTweak such as AI Visibility for Apps & Games and AI Visibility for Games . The throughline across his posts on Cannes Lions, Reddit's Conversation Studio, and product announcements is that "LLMs look across the web for credible signals" , which means marketers now have to think beyond store rankings toward authentic conversations and trusted communities.

This focus on AI-driven discovery is paired with a clear-eyed view of what AI can and cannot do for builders. In one of his sharpest formulations, he argues that "almost anyone can now build an app or a SaaS" with tools like Claude Code, but warns that "AI can generate code. It cannot magically create the data your product needs" . This is not just a product pitch, it is a genuine position on where value accrues once building becomes commoditized: "The ability to build is becoming universal. Access to great data can make the difference" . He returns to this build-versus-data distinction as a lens for understanding competitive advantage in an AI-saturated market, and it frames how he talks about AppTweak's own API and MCP integration as infrastructure for a new generation of builders .

Verdin also engages seriously, almost philosophically, with AI beyond its business applications. Commenting on Anthropic's research into model interpretability, he describes a "small internal space in Claude, called the J-space, where information becomes reportable, controllable and available for complex reasoning" , and draws an explicit parallel to Stanislas Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace theory in neuropsychology . This post shows a mind that treats AI not merely as a go-to-market topic but as a genuine intellectual puzzle, consistent with his enthusiasm for AppTweak's internal "TIL Talk" culture, where employees present on subjects "completely unrelated to our business," including a colleague's session on quantum computing, because "curiosity has no boundaries" .

On leadership and company-building, Verdin is consistent in insisting that growth is a people problem before it is a revenue problem. During appraisal season he writes that "a scale up must not only grow its revenue and products. It must grow its people" , and he is candid about the difficulty of feedback itself, noting it "requires honesty, clarity and care" to give and "openness, humility and the willingness to act" to receive . This same values set surfaces in his account of AppTweak's global offsite in Ouddorp, where he reflects that "building a company is not only about strategy, product, and numbers. It is also about the people, the culture, and the energy we create together" . He treats team rituals, an indoor football match followed by a French crêpes versus Belgian waffles contest , or the TIL Talks , as load-bearing parts of culture, not decorative extras.

A recurring, almost personal theme is national pride tied to collective effort over individual talent, which he explicitly generalizes into a leadership lesson. Writing about Belgium's World Cup exit against Spain, he says the team "did not surrender" and argues "pride does not come only from winning. It comes from the way you face difficulty" , concluding that "talent matters, but commitment, trust, and collective effort can carry people much further than expected" . He draws a similar thread from Tomorrowland's scale, noting it was "created from Belgium, a country of 12 million inhabitants" , framing both examples as evidence that small countries and small teams can produce outsized results through sustained effort rather than raw resources.

Taken together, his output over this period reads as a practitioner's running commentary on two convictions held simultaneously: that AI is restructuring how products get discovered and built, requiring companies to move fast on AI visibility and data access , and that none of this matters without deliberate investment in people, feedback, and culture inside the company doing the building . He does not present these as competing priorities but as two halves of the same job, visible in how his posts alternate between product strategy at Cannes Lions and reflections on appraisal season within the same short stretch of time.