France has high ambitions in terms of artificial intelligence and is increasing its investments to establish itself among the European leaders in the sector.
The adoption of these technologies in companies nevertheless remains gradual: in 2024, only 10% of French companies reported using artificial intelligence technologies in their daily activities. The end of support for Windows 10 and the renewal of computer equipment that accompanies it, however, opens a window of transformation rarely observed in the recent history of professional technologies.
Behind what often appears to be a simple upgrade is in reality a more structuring decision: that of the place that artificial intelligence will occupy tomorrow in the daily activity of employees.
Reducing this renewal to a budgetary arbitration would amount to treating a competitiveness issue as a simple infrastructure issue.
The workplace regains a strategic role in the company
For more than a decade, enterprise IT has been organized around a continuous movement towards the cloud, gradually relegating the workstation to the status of a terminal for accessing applications and data.
The rise of artificial intelligence is changing this balance.
Transcription of meetings, documentary synthesis, translation, contextual research or writing assistance: a growing number of tasks can now be performed directly on the user’s equipment, as close as possible to the uses and data handled on a daily basis.
The cloud remains relevant for the most complex processing. Local processing provides speed of execution, increased confidentiality and better control of data flows.
The workstation thus ceases to be a simple technical intermediary and once again becomes a value creation tool. In a context marked by tensions over skills, a few minutes saved each day on repetitive tasks represent, at the scale of an organization, thousands of hours reallocated to activities with higher added value.
Continuing to evaluate equipment according to yesterday’s criteria would be a mistake
Processor power, amount of memory or battery life remain important criteria, but they are no longer sufficient to measure the real value of a professional workstation.
The ability to execute certain artificial intelligence processing locally, to limit transfers of sensitive data or to reduce dependence on external resources are now becoming just as decisive.
The main mistake would be to consider the renewal of workstations as an IT maintenance operation carried out at the lowest cost. This logic belonged to a period when hardware essentially constituted a medium for accessing applications. It becomes much more questionable when the workstation directly participates in productivity, data security and the integration of artificial intelligence into business processes.
Major technological disruptions rarely benefit organizations that wait until they become essential before acting.
Artificial intelligence applied to the workplace is part of this dynamic. The question is no longer whether companies will integrate AI into their work environment, but how quickly they will decide to make it a performance lever.
In the coming years, the ability to transform the workplace into an operational advantage could well become one of the new frontiers of competitiveness.
