Olivier Laurent

Olivier Laurent has more than twenty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry, at the intersection of commercial strategy, contract negotiation and operational execution, in complex and regulated environments. He started out as a sales and scientific representative, then rose through the ranks of the commercial function to become commercial director. Already a web advocate at the time, he helped his teams through the transition to digital tools.

Building on that experience and his passion for the web and new technologies, he went on to found and run, one after the other, two digital development companies serving clients in healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. Their work included platforms for post-marketing studies, clinical trials, registries and patient engagement for major pharmaceutical groups, in Belgium and across the EEMEA region (Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa). He also launched a start-up selected as an Alpha Startup at Web Summit 2017.

Now back in the pharmaceutical industry, which he had never really left, he remains active there in commercial strategy, commercial negotiation and market access, with the same interest in technology that serves business processes and performance. Alongside this, since the summer of 2024 he has devoted most of his free time to Human Frontier and Riftveil.

In 2024 he took online university programmes in generative AI leadership, trustworthy AI and prompt engineering (Vanderbilt), and in AI in healthcare, including the evaluation of AI applications (Stanford).

Human Frontier is his personal reflection on how human judgment is evolving in the age of AI: the often invisible frontier between augmentation by AI and cognitive delegation, the moment when one stops truly understanding what one is validating, without realising it. Riftveil is its operational answer. He writes in a personal capacity.