Michel entered the oil palm industry with a focus on connectivity and precision positioning. This strategic approach may explain the lack of competition in Southeast Asia (SEA) for the two companies he founded.

• He established TanaLink, a company on record for monitoring primarily manual labourers over 40,000 hectares mainly in Sabah and Sarawak, with a yield increase of 30%.
• Just before COVID, he initiated the PalmINNOV study group in Sabah, together with an agronomist, a breeder, a wildlife specialist, and a software traceability expert. This group has since evolved into a corporation named PalmINNOV Pte Ltd in Singapore. Its Malaysian subsidiary, PalmINNOV Sdn Bhd, launched in 2024, while the registration of its Indonesian subsidiary, PT PalmINNOV, is currently in progress. Both the Indonesian and Malaysian branches of PalmINNOV aim to deliver and train planters one estate at a time in utilising machinery, IT solutions, AI, and terrestrial and spatial IoT developed by PalmINNOV. This approach enables planters to monitor all activities within a specific estate with a profit-and-loss account for each palm.

Besides boosting planters’ revenue by 50%, this initiative also reduces reliance on the increasingly scarce labour force by 40%.

Michel first recognised the potential of GPS technology during an assignment involving the French Navy. He later trained in wireless connectivity under the inventor of Wavenis, a low-power, long-range wireless technology that predates LoRa by nine years.

Much of Michel’s career has centred on identifying talent and technological solutions for issues in Southeast Asia. Upon entering the oil palm sector, he quickly realised that planters were overly focused on machinery instead of directing that machinery to locate the next ripe bunch or verifying the ripeness of a bunch before harvesting it. As a result, planters’ income can now increase from TanaLink 30% to the PalmINNOV 50%, while saving 40% of the no longer available labour.

In addition to his technological endeavours, Michel teamed up with Marc Ancrenaz to create the PONGO Alliance, a collaborative initiative focused on reducing human-animal conflicts in and around oil palm estates. Recently, he also collaborated with Innovafeed to formulate a strategy for Southeast Asia that involves co-locating insect protein plants near major oil palm biomass producers