At the closing Demo Day of the third cohort of the Microsoft GenAI Studio, on May 20, 2026 in Paris, Microsoft France awarded Humind the prize for the greatest agentic AI transformation. The same day, Microsoft published what it had observed during our four months in the program: visitors who talk with our e-commerce AI agent convert up to 21% more than others, and the average size of our new clients tripled. Here is what that transformation consisted of, and how to read those numbers.
Four months, fifteen startups, a morning on a barge
The third cohort of the Microsoft GenAI Studio ran from January to May 2026, hosted at STATION F. Fifteen French startups were selected from more than 200 applications, and Humind was on the list announced on January 6, 2026, in the Commerce and Sales category. The program combined technical and business mentorship from Microsoft and its partners (STATION F, Mistral AI, NVIDIA, GitHub, Databricks, Cellenza and ENGIE), workshops on responsible AI and security, up to $350,000 in Azure credits and access to more than 11,000 models through Azure AI Foundry.
The Demo Day took place on the morning of May 20, 2026 aboard the barge Annette K., moored at Port de Javel Bas in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where each of the fifteen teams presented the result of those four months. We told elsewhere how Humind entered the Microsoft GenAI Studio. This article tells how it ended.
The prize for the greatest agentic AI transformation
Alexis and I pitched the solution and the road covered over those four months in front of Microsoft, ENGIE and a panel of investors. Humind left the Demo Day with the prize for the greatest agentic AI transformation, awarded by Microsoft France. SKEMA Business School, where we both studied, reported it in June 2026, quoting Alexis:
"We had the opportunity to pitch our solution and our progress over the past four months in front of Microsoft, ENGIE and a panel of investors. We won the prize for the greatest agentic AI transformation. It is a testament to the quality and maturity of the solution."
Alexis Hespelle
Co-founder, Humind, quoted by SKEMA Business School
The word that matters in this prize is transformation. It is not a reward for the best idea or the best pitch. It recognizes the ground covered in four months by a product built on AI agents that accompany the visitors of an e-commerce site, understand what they really need, and act accordingly, serving the shopper as much as the brand's commercial performance. Most of that ground was covered under the hood.
What Microsoft published about our e-commerce AI agent
Microsoft's article about the cohort, published on May 20, 2026, highlights three startups out of the fifteen. The paragraph about Humind reads:
"Humind develops conversational AI agents that accompany shoppers on e-commerce sites, with a direct impact on conversion: visitors who talk with the agent convert up to 21% more than others. During the Microsoft GenAI Studio program, the startup crossed a technical milestone by rethinking its software architecture, moving from a monolithic system to a far more scalable modular architecture. As a result, in four months, the average size of its new clients tripled, and Humind now serves brands such as Puressentiel, Supersmart and La Chaise Longue with service levels that meet the requirements of a large account."
Microsoft Source EMEA
Article of May 20, 2026
The full article is available on Microsoft Source EMEA. Both figures come from that publication, dated May 20, 2026.
Up to 21% more conversions: what this number measures
The wording matters: up to 21%. It is the upper bound of what we have observed on merchant accounts, comparing visitors who engaged in a conversation with the agent to visitors of the same site who did not. The same order of magnitude appeared four months earlier in the profile published by SKEMA in January 2026, which also mentioned around a hundred clients at that date.
Average client size tripled
This second number is about Humind, not about our merchants. Over the four months of the program, the average size of the companies signing with us tripled. It is a company indicator, not a performance promise: it says who we now serve, and it sheds light on the work described below.
The invisible part: from an MVP to a scalable platform
The sentence in Microsoft's article we are proudest of is also the least spectacular: the move from a monolithic system to a modular architecture. That is the real content of the transformation the prize recognized.
When we entered the GenAI Studio, our backend was a single block that did everything: chat, catalog, analytics, background jobs. It is the normal architecture for a young product, and it is the one that does not hold when clients grow. With Microsoft's help, we restructured everything: a split into microservices, independent scaling for each part, redundancy, servers in France and in the United States, and a compliance upgrade. A component can now be fixed, deployed or scaled without putting the rest at risk.
None of this is visible to a shopper. When a merchant with a large catalog puts an AI sales agent in front of every visitor, 24 hours a day, the interesting question is no longer "can the model answer" but "what happens at 3am when a dependency slows down". Large accounts ask that question first, and being able to answer it changed the nature of the contracts we sign.
Support that goes beyond the technical
The $350,000 in Azure credits are the most visible part of the program. They are not the most valuable. What made the difference was the quality and availability of the support, in particular that of Eric Grenon, at Microsoft France, who dedicated several hours to us every week throughout the program. Around him, Microsoft mobilized its engineers on our concrete topics: data analysis, security, deployment, everything that makes a solution genuinely enterprise ready.
And the support did not stop at the technical. The program also helped us rework our commercial proposals for large accounts and structure our contracts. That combination is what allowed us to sign clients that would have been very hard to reach otherwise, and to move from mid-size e-commerce sites to very large platforms.
Measuring what this would do on your store
The numbers Microsoft published are dated and sourced, and that is how we like to present them. For an order of magnitude on your own traffic, our ROI calculator starts from your real data: your audience, your conversion rate and your average order value, rather than someone else's numbers.
What we take away
Thank you to Microsoft France for this prize and for these four months. A prize awarded by a player of this stature, in front of a panel of investors, validates the road covered and the one we have chosen: specialized AI agents for e-commerce, built on enterprise-grade infrastructure. The transformation it recognizes is already at work for our clients, and it opened doors we would not have passed through alone.
To find out what this would look like on your catalog, the fastest way is still to see it run on your own products. You can book a demo and we will walk through it with your data.
