The Ministry of Action and Public Accounts announces the deployment of a tool powered by models from the start-up Mistral AI, after a pilot phase of 10,000 agents.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Action and Public Accounts announced that the government will generalize a conversational agent using artificial intelligence for around one million state civil service agents, out of the 2.6 million in the state civil service. Called “the Assistant”, the tool follows an experiment lasting several months with 10,000 agents, said the office of Minister David Amiel during a briefing with the press.
The Assistant is “powered by models” from the French artificial intelligence start-up Mistral AI, selected by the government. The cost of this generalization is estimated at around 700,000 euros, including access to Mistral models.
Objectives and uses
The executive wants to give agents the opportunity “to get rid of time-consuming tasks and unnecessary paperwork, to concentrate on what is at the heart of their work”. According to David Amiel, the tool will be “the equivalent of ChatGPT but in a sovereign and secure version to be able to carry out documentary research, summaries, and analysis of summaries”. The minister, however, qualifies: “It is obvious that AI is an opportunity as well as a threat”, warning of the “risk of being dependent on these extra-European technologies”.
This generalization is based on work undertaken a year earlier. As part of a call for expressions of interest launched in April 2025, the Interministerial Digital Directorate (Dinum) and the General Directorate of Enterprises (DGE), with the State Purchasing Directorate (DAE) and the French Tech mission, have selected around a hundred artificial intelligence solutions for administrations. Carried out under the leadership of the Minister of Public Action and the Minister Delegate responsible for Artificial Intelligence and digital technology, this call constitutes a base of “off-the-shelf” technological bricks that can be mobilized by the public sphere.
This overview emphasizes security and hosting requirements, with certain solutions being qualified for SecNumCloud, the State label for trusted cloud computing. The Assistant is part of this logic and responds to the objective of technological sovereignty declared by the government, in order to limit dependence on extra-European offers.
