Great AI starts with great people.
Meet our team of humans and learn what we’re all about.
The Heyday mission
The fuel that lights our fire, every. single. day.
Since day one, Heyday’s focus has been helping retailers humanize ecommerce through conversational AI. As our technology grew more sophisticated and consumers looked to chat more frequently as a way to interact with the brands they love – Heyday’s product evolved. We’re proud to say that since we set out on this adventure three years ago, we’ve enabled millions of conversations with hundreds of retail brands across four continents.
It goes without saying that 2020 brought on a whole new world of challenges for retailers. COVID-19 crystallized our vision to help retailers sell and service from a distance by recreating the in-store experience. To get there, we launched the first self-serve version of Heyday to all Shopify merchants in July this year, giving the Fortune 500,000 access to AI and automation typically reserved for the Fortune 500.
Leadership team
Say hey, bonjour!
to our founding team
Steve Desjarlais, CEO
Steve is a former Head of Product of Ubisoft, a crown jewel in the video game industry. Prior to co-founding Heyday, Steve led a team of 50 developers overseeing the development of award-winning blockbuster games like Splinter Cell, Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Just Dance to name a few. Steve’s extensive software development and gamification knowledge infuse Heyday with a focus on user experience where every interaction is designed to personally engage customers.
Etienne Merineau, CMO
Etienne is a former ad agency director turned entrepreneur. In 2018, Etienne clinched a spot on the prestigious Marketing & Advertising Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He’s a Conversational UX pioneer and AI industry thought leader featured in Forbes, VentureBeat, The Washington Post, Business Insider, Accenture’s AI Effect podcast and SiriusXM radio to name a few. Throughout his career, Etienne’s work has won more than 55 advertising awards. In addition to leading Heyday’s strategy and marketing, Etienne also sits on the jury of The Webby Awards and Mobile UX Awards.
Hugues Rousseau, CTO
Hugues has more than 20 years of software development and AI experience under his belt. He is the former Director of Technology at Lightspeed Retail, and former Director of Software Engineering at Ubisoft where he led a team of 55 developers while working on award-winning video games including Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Watch Dogs & Rainbow Six. At Heyday, Hugues is laser-focused on building a world-class, enterprise-grade technology platform that empowers retailers to personalize the entire customer experience at scale with Conversational AI.
David Bordeleau, COO
David is a Swiss Army knife working at the intersection of Engineering, Product & Operations. David is a certified Scrum Master and Agile pioneer with nearly 20 years of software development experience and 12 years of managerial experience under his belt. At Heyday, David brings his world-class cloud infrastructure knowledge acquired from his years as Director of Genband’s R&D lab (Ribbon Communications) & Octasic. Not only is he a really nice guy, but he’s very smart too: David holds two patents in the field of creative technology development.
Our executives
Key partnerships
Platforms
Shopify (Plus, Core & Ping)
Magento
Lightspeed
Prestashop
Channels
Google Business Messages
Facebook Messenger
Apps
Klaviyo
Algolia
Partners
Tailbase
(part of Constellation Software)
Le Panier Bleu
Heyday in the news
Here’s where we’ve been around.
“We knew the next evolution of our multi-channel customer experience needed to include online chat and Heyday’s AI platform was a perfect fit. The integration and initial rollout could not have gone smoother.”
Etienne Merineau
Want to dig deeper into the world of Conversational AI? Take a crash course with our ebook.