Welcome 👋

I am currently CTO AI Modernisation at Theodo, where I build agentic factories: pipelines of AI agents that reverse-engineer, write, test and validate production code. On our projects, 100% of the code is now written by AI.

Modernising legacy applications is what we apply them to first — rewriting business-critical systems 3x faster than a manual rewrite, for clients like Pernod Ricard.

I am a speaker on AI Coding and agentic engineering, sharing these lessons at conferences and company events.

Have a legacy application to modernise?
Looking for a speaker on AI Coding?
Contact me at quentin.pleple@theodo.com

I am excited about AI coding assistants, modernising old systems, Lean methodologies, and LLMs and how they work internally.

Before that, I was Lead Generative AI Architect at Reverso for 2 years, and worked 14 years at Short Edition as co-founder and CTO. I studied at Polytechnique (France) and UCSD (California).

Talks

• Retrospective: migrating a business critical application for Pernod Ricard 2x faster with AI, Praxedo, 2026
• Retrospective: migrating a business critical application for Pernod Ricard 2x faster with AI, Séminaire DSI Filhet-Allard, 2026
• Retrospective: migrating a business critical application for Pernod Ricard 2x faster with AI, Upsun, 2026
• REX: passing the Claude Certified Architect certification (fr), webinar, 2026
• AI Modernisation: the HealthHero case study (fr), Clariane, 2026 (webinar)
• AI-Augmented SDLC: rethinking the software lifecycle, Orisha Tech Academy, 2026
• Table ronde "AI Coding: retour d'expérience Pernod Ricard & Anthropic", Dinner Tech.Rocks, 2026
• Let your agent code while you sleep, Gen AI Days, 2026
• Enseignements de 2 ans de modernisation d'applications legacy avec l'IA, Extens CTO day, 2026
• Table ronde "L'impact de l'IA sur la tech", Club Ai Salon Paris, 2026
• AI Modernisation, Tech.Rocks Summit, 2025 [watch on youtube]
• The Power Of The Useless, TEDx Erasmus University, 2017
• Automatic Verbatims Analysis (fr), Webdays Grenoble IAE, 2017
• Publishing, Algorithms and Big Data (fr), Université Editis Éducation, 2016
• Data Mining Competition: Grenoble Tree Management (fr), Scop La Péniche, 2016 [project]
• Interactive Topic Modeling (fr), Statlearn 2016, 2016
• 5 years of Short Edition (fr), Groupe Mines Business Angels, 2016
• 5 years of Short Edition (fr), Club AgroEntrepreneurs, 2016
• Interactive Topic Modeling with LDA (fr), Meetup group Grenoble Data Science, 2015
• Big Data Trends in 2015 (fr), Meilleur Dev de France, 2015 [watch an extract on youtube]

Media Mentions

• Youtube: Quentin Pleplé @Theodo : l'IA générative est un levier industriel, pas un gadget, SFEIR TV, 2026
• Youtube: Rencontre Quentin, CTO AI-Modernisation chez Theodo, Theodo, 2026
• Academic article: Case study of Short Edition's predictive quality algorithm, Réseaux, 2018
• Youtube: Nos partenaires témoignent - Interview de Quentin Pleplé, Eloquant, 2018
• Youtube: Coppola, le parrain du Distributeur d'Histoires Courtes, Short Edition, 2017
• Article: Parcours de développeurs, Clubic, 2016
• Article: Short Edition, la petite start-up française qui a séduit Francis Ford Coppola, France 24, 2016
• Radio: French Story Machines (You and Yours), BBC, 2016
• Article: France's Short Édition Lengthens Its Reach, Publishing Perspectives, 2016
• Article: France's Beloved Short Story Dispensers Are Coming to America, Literary Hub, 2016
• Article: Quentin Pleplé - Co-Founder of Short Story Dispensers, Ideamensch, 2016
• Article: The Short Story Interview: Quentin Pleplé from Short Edition, TSS Publishing, 2015
• TV: Hello Startup : Big Datext, le prédicateur de succès des articles, BFM Business, 2015
• TV: Short-story dispensers help people kill time, Russia Today, 2015
• Article: Un algorithme pour juger de la qualité d'un livre, Le Figaro, 2014
• Article: Un algorithme pour déterminer la qualité littéraire d'un livre, L'Express, 2014
• Article: L'algorithme de sélection littéraire : interview de Q. Pleplé, Quatre Sans Quatre, 2014
• Article: Un algorithme français pour prédire la qualité littéraire d'un livre, Actualitté, 2014
• Article: La vérité (du texte) et la délicatesse (de l'algo), kézako ? Une piste (encore une) avec Quentin Pleplé, Yakwala, 2014
• Article: Le Big Data arrive dans l’édition : Short Edition développe l’algorithme de prédiction de la qualité littéraire, Decideo, 2014
• Radio: Short Edition, l'éditeur communautaire de la littérature courte, NRJ, 2014

Publications

• Paper: Q. Pleplé and T. Hoffenberg, Reverso Define: An AI-Powered Contextual Dictionary for Professionals, Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit, 2025 [pdf]
• Patent: Q. Pleplé and C. Sibieude, Interactive terminal with an electronic unit controlling a printer for printing content, particularly texts, in a random manner, U.S. Patent 10,536,589 and French Patent 3,033,922, 2020
• Book chapter: Q. Pleplé, Big Data, Le Livre Du CTO, edited by Éditions Edilivre, 2018
• Paper: T. Hamon, Q. Pleplé, P. Paroubek, P. Zweigenbaum, C. Grouin, Automatic Analysis of Scientific and Literary Texts. Presentation and Results of the DEFT2014 Text Mining Challenge, DEFT 2014 Workshop: Text Mining Challenge, 2014 [pdf]
• Master thesis: Q. Pleplé, Interactive Topic Modeling, University of California, San Diego, 2013 [pdf]

Lasts posts

• Building a basic autograd engine from scratch, 2024
• Building an AWS VPC from scratch with Terraform, 2023
• Setting up an Apache proxy on EC2 with Terraform, 2023
• Schedule AWS Lambda Functions Using Terraform, 2023
• Why an AWS Multi-Account Strategy Matters, 2023
• A Bash script to debug AWS CLI credentials, 2023
• Le Big Data Expliqué, 2016
• Hive: How To Create A Table From CSV Files in AWS S3, 2015
• Install Python Packages On AWS Elastic Beanstalk, 2014
• Install Phpredis On AWS Elastic Beanstalk, 2014
• Install Node.js On AWS Elastic Beanstalk, 2014
• Install APC On AWS Elastic Beanstalk, 2014
• Project: Color Apache Logs, 2014
• Debugging Long MySQL queries cheatsheet, 2014
• Understand Composer Versions, 2014
• Using PMI For Topic Relevance, 2013
• Word relevance within a topic, 2013
• Word Distinctiveness And Saliency, 2013
• PHP: Collapsing Object In Var_dump, 2013
• APC warnings: M/G suffixes, 2013
• Greedy Algorithms, 2013
• Dynamic Programming, 2013
• Divide and Conquer, 2013
• On Smoothing In Topic Coherence Measures, 2013
• Topic Coherence To Evaluate Topic Models, 2013
• Perplexity To Evaluate Topic Models, 2013
• Probabilistic Topic Modeling, 2013
• Linear Topic Modeling, 2013
• Approximation Methods For Bayesian Inference, 2013
• Bayesian Inference, 2013

See all posts

Teaching

• Data Mining, 15h, Université Grenoble Alpes, 2017
• Business Intelligence and Big Data, 11h, IAE de Grenoble, 2017
• Machine Learning Foundations, 4h, Grenoble INP, ESISAR, 2016
• Machine Learning Foundations, 20h, EPSI Grenoble, 2015
• Discrete maths, 200h, Teaching Assistant for S. Lovett and C. Lee, University of California, San Diego, 2013
• Design of Algorithms, 800h, Teaching Assistant for A. Kahng (2012), R. Paturi (2012), S. Dasgupta (2012) and R. Impagliazzo, (2013), University of California, San Diego

Funding

• Raised €1.5M from the French government through CIR (Research Tax Credit) initiative at Short Edition, 2013-2022
• Raised €500K (2013), €1.3M (2015) and €2M (2017) with my co-founders at Short Edition
• Raised €20K from the French DGA (Directorate General of Armament) for the development of a prototype navigation software designed for deployment on French Navy vessels, 2010

Certifications

• Anthropic certified: Claude Certified Architect - Foundations, 2026
• CSSC Certified: Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, 2023
• AWS certified: Solutions Architect - Associate, 2023
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate, 2021

Awards

• Ranked 5th at national coding competition Le Meilleur Dev de France (1000 participants), 2015
• 3rd prize at Best Collaborative Scientific Project at École Polytechnique (100 participants), 2010
• Bronze grade of the National Defense Medal awarded by the French Navy, 2009