France plans government chatbot as part of €655M AI push
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has announced that France will invest an additional €655 million in artificial intelligence (AI) between now and 2030. Some of that money will be used to set up a shared AI chatbot for all civil servants and to create a public health chatbot.
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has announced that France will invest an additional €655 million in artificial intelligence (AI) between now and 2030. Some of that money will be used to set up a shared AI chatbot for all civil servants and to create a public health chatbot.
- France will invest an additional €655 million in AI through 2030.
- The plan includes AI assistants for civil servants and public healthcare.
- The government says France must reduce reliance on foreign technology.
- The investment aligns with a broader push toward digital sovereignty.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
“Just like electricity yesterday, and the internet thirty years ago, artificial intelligence is already changing our lives. The time for experimentation is over. I have decided to accelerate the transformation of the government,” Prime Minister Lecornu says in a post on X, announcing the extra spending on AI.
In his message, he lays down the ambitions of the French government regarding AI.
For starters, Lecornu intends to fund an AI assistant to help all of France’s civil servants. According to The Next Web, the chatbot is meant to help with daily administrative work, including streamlining judicial procedures, supporting researchers, and handling government documents.
A second project that the Prime Minister mentions is a public health assistant for Ameli, France’s state health insurance agency. Lecornu wants this program to be realized by the end of the year.
Lastly, France is aiming to launch a new platform to facilitate access to public data.
“We can either be subjected to this (AI) revolution, or we can lead it. France has made its choice. It will rise to the challenge of this revolution and intends to play a leading role in it,” Lecornu continues on X.
On Tuesday, just before the start of the Viva Tech conference in Paris, Lecornu told the media that France “cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers,” but must have its own tools.
That might explain why France’s domestic intelligence agency DGSI decided to ditch Palantir in favor of French rival ChapsVision. Palantir is a tech company that sells military-grade AI integration tools to governments and businesses. ChapsVision is a French software company that specializes in data intelligence and AI for both private and public organizations.
Concerns about Europe’s reliance on American big tech companies to manage its critical infrastructure have been growing for some time amid political tensions between the EU and the United States.
Because of that, in January, France decided to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with the French videoconferencing platform Visio. In April, the country chose cloud provider Scaleway to host its Health Data Hub instead of Microsoft Azure.
Similar discussions are going on in other EU Member States, including Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.
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