Flamingo Ai has promoted COO Olivier Cauderlier to the CEO position, freeing-up founder Catriona Wallace to focus on growth.

Mr Cauderlier has been the insurtech’s COO since April. Ms Wallace said in February that she wanted to move to head up business development.

Dr Wallace will switch to part-time employment from September, she told the Australian Securities Exchange last Thursday.

“Olivier has deep experience in product strategy and management, technology, operations and customer success,” she said.

The Sydney-based Frenchman was formerly COO at cloud-based contact centre provider ipSCAPE.

Flamingo has bases in Sydney and the US, working on cognitive virtual assistants, journey assist platforms and unsupervised machine learning algorithms.

In recent months it has announced agreements to license its virtual assistant software to HSBC Australia and US-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company.