Henri Blondelle

Henri Blondelle is a geologist by training, having studied at Utah State University and the École Nationale des Pétroles et Moteurs. He began his career at BP in 1986, during a pivotal period when the company was adopting relational database management systems (RDBMS) to enhance the management of its oil and gas assets.

Driven by a passion for integrating well, seismic, and reservoir data, Henri joined CGG, where he contributed to the development of advanced workstations aimed at streamlining oil and gas exploration. In the 1990s, he played a key role in the creation of a seismic interpretation package leveraging neural networks—an experience that revealed to him the transformative power of data in building subsurface models without relying solely on deterministic inputs.

In the 2000s, Henri founded a new data management services division at Ipedex, a French oil and gas services company that later became SPI Oil & Gas Services. This initiative allowed him to explore the full lifecycle of data usage in oil and gas projects—from exploration and development to production and decommissioning.

Henri returned to CGG in 2012 to lead sales and marketing for its data services division, newly expanded through a merger with Fugro Geosciences. In this role, he championed the use of artificial intelligence to enhance data management processes.

In 2016, alongside two CGG colleagues, Henri co-founded Agile Data Decisions, a startup focused on developing an AI platform capable of extracting multimodal information from documents at scale. Today, this innovative solution is deployed across diverse sectors including energy, mining, healthcare, engineering, and defense.