The State has digitized its procedures without simplifying them: 34% of French people have difficulty with digital technology. A profession was born to fill this void, revealing a blind spot in dematerialization.
By digitizing its procedures, the State has shifted the administrative complexity to the user. Result: a third of French people in digital difficulty, procedures abandoned along the way, and a support ecosystem which has been structured to fill this void. And which reveals a blind spot in public digital transformation.
In a decade, the French administration has carried out one of the most ambitious digital transformations ofEurope. Taxes, vehicle registration, identity documents, social benefits: the counters have closed one after the other, replaced by platforms accessible 24 hours a day. On paper, the promise is kept: no more travel, no more queues, no more opening hours.
The reality experienced by users is, however, very different. A file is rejected because a supporting document was scanned in the wrong format. A procedure is interrupted a third of the way through because a statement was not understood, and there is no one to answer the question of why and how. A proof of address is refused without any usable explanation. A transfer code cannot be found when selling your car. Each of these micro-frictions, insignificant seen from afar, ends in the same way: the user blocks, sometimes starts again, most often gives up.
This abandonment can be measured. According to theINSEEa third of adults have already given up on carrying out an administrative procedure online. It’s not a question of negligence: they just couldn’t do it. Behind the statistics, there are rights not exercised, legal deadlines exceeded, and administrative situations which are silently deteriorating.
Digitizing is not simplifying
This is the blind spot of public digital transformation: putting a form online does not remove the complexity of a procedure. This transfers it. Yesterday, the complexity was absorbed by an agent at the counter, someone who corrected the error directly, rephrased the misunderstood question, directed people to the right part. Today, this complexity rests entirely on the user, alone faced with an interface which does not reformulate anything.
Let’s take a concrete example that millions of French people experience every year: registering a vehicle. The approach uses technical vocabulary (transfer certificate, transfer code, mandatetax clearance depending on the case), documents whose conformity obeys precise rules, and special cases (inheritance, imported vehicle, joint owners) that standardized pathways poorly manage. At the prefecture counter, an agent was translating. Online, it is up to the user to speak the language of the administration. The process has not been simplified: it has been retranslated into a format which presupposes an expert user.
However, this expert user is a statistical fiction. According to the latest INSEE survey on digital uses, published in February 2026, 7% of 16-74 year olds are illiterate and 27% have poor digital skills; i.e., in total, 34% of the population in difficulty with digital technology. A third of the country. Among those aged 60-74, electronic use affects 17% of people; over 75 years old, more than one in two people.
The administration has dematerialized the channel, not the support. This distinction, apparently technical, produces a political consequence: a compulsory process that has become exclusively digital is not a simplified process for everyone. For some citizens, it has become inaccessible.
The emergence of a profession that did not exist
Faced with this void, an ecosystem has been structured in the shadows in around ten years. Private actors, authorized by the State and subject to its approvals, have positioned themselves in a niche that did not exist: making dematerialized procedures practicable. Check a file before submission to avoid rejection. Translate administrative vocabulary. Manage special cases that automated routes do not provide for. Answer the phone when the user feels stuck.
This profession is not a survival from the past: it was born from dematerialization herself. It did not exist when the prefectures received the public. It is the direct product of a public policy choice: that of digitizing massively, at a sustained pace, without scaling support to the level of the imposed change. The State itself has recognized this need by deploying France Services houses and digital advisors in the territory: public authorities and authorized private actors respond, each at their own scale, to the same observation.
We need to be specific about what this ecosystem means. It is not a criticism of public service digital; it is a revealer. Its mere existence, and the demand that supports it, prove that between the service put online and the real needs of users, there remains a gap that the official dematerialization indicators do not measure. We count the forms posted online, but we rarely count the users left behind.
The next project is not technical
A successful dematerialization project is not measured by the number of closed counters or the rate of procedures available online. It is measured by just one thing: the proportion of users who complete their process, alone, without error and without abandonment. This indicator, namely the completion rate autonomous, should be the first criterion for evaluating any digital public service. But it almost never is.
The lesson goes far beyond administration. Banksinsurers, energy operators, health platforms: any organization that digitizes a service comes up against the same wall. We invest massively in the interface (course, designapplications), but rarely in what happens when the user blocks facing it. However, it is precisely here, in the friction, that the success or failure of the project plays out: an abandoned route is a lost customer for a company, but it is a right not exercised for a citizen.
France has successfully completed the first stage of its public digital transformation: going online. The second, ensuring that everyone completes their efforts, will be less spectacular, less visible in the balance sheets, but much more decisive. It will not require new platforms: it will require support to be considered not as a peripheral corrective, but as a component of the service itself. It is on this condition that dematerialization will finally keep its initial promise: to truly simplify the lives of all users.
