France wants its civil servants to share a chatbot. On Monday, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced an additional €655m for artificial intelligence, the headline use of which is a single sovereign conversational assistant intended for every public agent in the country, roughly a million people.
The assistant, according to the announcement, is meant to help with daily administrative work: streamlining certain judicial procedures, supporting researchers as they assemble project applications, and handling the routine document-shuffling that fills a government employee’s day.
The word the government keeps returning to is “sovereign,” meaning a tool built and hosted under French control rather than rented from an American provider.
The chatbot is the most visible item, but not the only one. Lecornu also outlined a dedicated public-health assistant for Ameli, the state health-insurance agency, and a new platform to make public data easier to reach.
The remainder of the €655m is earmarked for the less photogenic foundations: computing capacity, research, support for businesses, and industrial sectors trying to fold AI into how they work.
