Smarter Government, Powered by AI: What We Learned in France
Public Engagement & Strategy Manager
21 May 2025
Imagine a future where artificial intelligence enhances the efficiency, accessibility, and responsiveness of government services for all citizens. This is a vision we share with our French counterparts in ALLiaNCE – the French cross-government incubator for public sector AI projects. Recently, experts from i.AI and GOV.UK came together with ALLiaNCE in Paris for a dynamic exchange. The two-day workshop, made possible with the support of the British Embassy in Paris, ignited collaboration and knowledge-sharing as we both strive to ethically and effectively embed AI at the heart of government for the public good.
Forget dry presentations. This was a hands-on experience, a chance for us to trade insights, discuss real-world problems, and map out exciting possibilities for working together. We shared demos of our tools, getting into the nuts and bolts of how they work, compared notes on different approaches for evaluation, and identified areas where we could combine our strengths.
The gathering also shone a light on some impressive AI products that are already making a difference in public services. From virtual assistants that provide instant answers to tools that help with secure meeting transcriptions and even innovative AI solutions for digitising planning maps, it was a showcase of what's possible.
Explore the key insights from the team
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Ishan BhojwaniHead of ALLiaNCE Incubator (interim)
On both sides of the Channel, we are not chasing hype; we focus on practical use cases—document analysis, summarisation, administrative drafting—that free up time for public agents and improve service quality for citizens.
Liam WilkinsonHead of AI Incubation
The direct comparison on tech and approaches was priceless, as Government AI teams there’s a lot to cover nowadays. I’m excited to see what we can build together going forward!
Tim PaulHead of Creative & Design
We found a lot of common ground and identified multiple opportunities for closer collaboration. The way they collaborated with open source partners to develop La Suite numérique was particularly inspiring.
Lucy MakinsonHead of Impact & Evaluation
ALLiaNCE’s approach to having practitioner sponsors for their key products is a great way of keeping them tied to their users and the end goal – definitely something we could learn from.
Max HollingdaleLead Applied AI Engineer
The French team has state of the art, open source, technology, such as La Suite that has been developed both in-house and through pan-european collaboration with Germany and the Netherlands. GDS and ALLiaNCE should collaborate to expand and add AI-capabilities to these strong foundations.
Farzana ChowdhuryPublic Engagement & Strategy Manager
The unconference was an amazing opportunity to see how our international peers approach the same challenges that we face in public sector AI adoption. It was fascinating to see the digital sovereignty they have built to solve the unique challenges they face. I am particularly looking forward to seeing how we can do similar initiatives in the future with other international AI incubators and continue to share learnings in this rapidly evolving space.
French AI Innovations: Examples from ALLiaNCE
To illustrate the innovative work being carried out by ALLiaNCE, here are some examples of their impactful AI products:
Albert API
Albert API provides generative AI models to French government entities. The aim is to offer AI services to the entire public administration to generate use cases that benefit employees and citizens. Features include access to open source Large Language Models (LLMs) for various uses (text generation, summaries, translations, etc.), audio transcription, and tools to analyse documentary corpuses.
Compar:IA
Compar:IA improves the quality of conversational language models for French-speaking users and raises awareness among citizens about generative AI. It seeks to ensure the place of French and European languages in AI by inviting users to vote for their preferred response to a given question in French. This approach generates datasets of human preferences in French, which are then made available to the academic and industrial community.
Mon Assistant Parquet
Mon Assistant Parquet accelerates the processing of cases at the public prosecutor's office in the courts, shortening procedural times and optimising the working time of magistrates. It assists with decision-making and drafting, using AI to extract relevant information from files to propose a direction to the magistrate or to draft factual summaries of criminal proceedings or procedural documents.
Looking Ahead
Our time with ALLiaNCE went beyond sharing ideas, we also discussed tangible actions that can be taken forward to reap the benefits of working collaboratively, for example:
- Fostering open collaboration: Exploring more opportunities to share code and data, promoting a culture of openness and collaboration in AI development across borders.
- Building ethical frameworks: Sharing methodologies to ensure fairness and accountability in AI.
- Looking across Europe: Developing forums for collaboration and knowledge sharing across Europe.
A massive thank you to ALLiaNCE and the British Embassy in Paris for making this conference so worthwhile! It was seriously helpful, inspiring and interesting and together with ALLiaNCE, we're making real progress toward AI that truly benefits the public.