Profile
Background
Pauline Corriou spent more than 8 years in consulting for large corporations, with one obsession: understanding what users really live through to build the best experiences. Interviews, field observation, large-scale studies: she immerses herself in their daily lives to extract what makes a digital product truly useful. Then she designs it.
In 2023, she joined Imagination Machine, the Nantes impact startup studio behind Beem, Smala, Outgoing and Cockpit Agriculture. As Operating Partner and Lead User Researcher, she steps in from the first days of a project to secure its potential and relevance. She turns an intuition into a well-framed problem, then into a product that finds its audience, with one simple rule: listen before you build.
Motiv was born inside the studio, and she co-founded it with Charlotte Le Hénanff. More than 600 interviews with teenagers, parents, teachers and neuroscience researchers led to a clear finding: 9 in 10 tenth graders do their homework with AI, and very often it is the AI that does the thinking for them.
Motiv is an AI-native app built for teenagers and their developing brains. Students snap a photo of their lesson and practice out loud, less than 15 minutes a day, with a coach to learn by speaking and to express themselves better. Launched in January 2026 in Nantes, the app is already used by more than 35,000 teenagers. In June, its AI jury ran 15,000 mock baccalauréat oral exams in three weeks, with sessions averaging 16 minutes.
Perspective
Digital and GenAI credentials
Pauline Corriou applies generative AI to education with one conviction: AI must not think for teenagers, it must train them to learn. At Motiv, she leads the product, a real-time voice AI that talks, asks questions, challenges and adapts to each teenager. Her standard: an experience that is effective, engaging and sovereign, with data hosted in France and an architecture that picks the best model for each use, far from a cramming tool or a sycophantic chatbot. Her ambition: make Motiv the European reference for teenagers’ cognitive training, because taking care of your brain will become as natural as taking care of your body. She comes to defend this vision at the GENAI DAYS Startup Contest.
