France
country report
Unlocking France’s AI Potential in the European Commission’s Digital Decade
The European Commission’s Digital Decade policy programme set bold targets, aiming to make Europe a digital leader by 2030. In France, the goal is for 75% of French businesses to be using AI by 2030. This study finds that digital transformation in France is well underway, and that the country’s businesses are on track to meet the Digital Decade targets, if they are able to maintain their accelerated uptake of technology.
Key Statistics
However, skills risk not keeping pace with aspirations. Over half of French businesses (51%) report that basic digital skills are the digital skillset most lacking in their organisation, and only 19% of French businesses find it easy to find new hires with the necessary digital skills.
2023 was the ‘year of AI’ in France and across Europe, with the number of businesses adopting AI up 35% from 2022 in France (32% in Europe).
If France is able to maintain this level of adoption to 2030, it could add €589 billion to the French economy (€600 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the European economy), an additional €99 billion from 2022's prediction.
The benefits of AI are already making their mark: for French businesses that have already integrated AI technologies, 91% have increased their efficiency, 73% have saved costs, and 71% have streamlined their business processes.
There is strong belief in the positive future impact of AI: 65% of French businesses believe that AI will transform their industry within the next five years.
2023: a ‘year of AI’ driving an acceleration in economic growth
French businesses saw a large increase in the rate of adoption of AI technologies in 2023. AI adoption stands at 27%, up from 20% in 2022; an increase of 35% (32% in Europe). Furthermore, 68% of AI adopters are using large language models (LLMs) or generative AI.
If this rate of growth is maintained, €3.4 trillion could be added to the European economy by 2030. This is an additional €600 billion to last year’s prediction, based on the increased adoption of AI. In France, it could add €589 billion to the French economy, an additional €99 billion from last year’s prediction of €490 billion.
Businesses that have led the charge in AI integration are already seeing the benefits to their operations. In France, in line with European averages:
91
%
of businesses report increased efficiency
89
%
have
saved costs
71
%
have streamlined their business processes
AI was not the only technology to see growth in adoption over the past year: businesses increased their investment in digital technology overall by 50% over the year, and in particular the growth in AI adoption has been supported by an increase in the use of cloud computing technologies, which are foundational for the use of AI. 51% of French businesses reported that cloud computing has become more important since September 2022.
Citizens share excitement around AI
French citizens also feel a sense of confidence in the transformative power of AI.
Exactly half of the adult population in France anticipate that AI will have a tangible impact on their lives in the upcoming three years.
Certain sectors stand out for their potential to be changed by new AI technology: namely healthcare, education, and transportation, with 64%, 63%, and 61% of citizens respectively suggesting that AI is likely to revolutionise these areas in the coming years. Over half of citizens (52%) also view AI as a key tool against leading societal challenges, notably climate change and disease prevention.
French citizens see significant opportunities for increasing digitalisation of public services - 53% believe that their government is currently doing a good job at taking advantage of digital technology, but the same number feel that there is still significantly more the government can do to make it easier to access public services through digital technology.
In November 2022, AWS announced Startup Ramp France, to accelerate the development of early stage startups in the public sector, supporting their growth and innovation. This is part of a recognition that startups are key to accelerating the digital transformation of Europe’s public sector.
Without a better understanding of how emerging technologies are currently being used and how they are building the economy, swathes of the population risk being excluded from the new digital economy, potentially reducing the possibility of meeting the goals of the Digital Decade and delivering on France, and Europe’s digital potential.
Conclusion
This study shows that France has real potential to achieve the European Commission’s targets for AI adoption by 2030, if French businesses keep adopting these technologies at a steady pace. French companies and citizens have the ambition to seize the potential offered by new technologies. Moreover, companies clearly recognise the importance of investing in these technologies in order to derive concrete benefits from them.
The risk lies in ensuring that the current digital skills gap does not hold France back from achieving its potential. This study outlines a number recommendations for overcoming these barriers to economic growth through digital transformation, and giving businesses the potential to recognise the vast transformative potential promised by AI.
Case Study:
Hugging Face: Empowering Businesses to Harness AI
Hugging Face is the leading open platform for AI builders, with main offices in Paris, France. Hugging Face provides access to over 300,000 pre-trained models for any machine learning task, from natural language processing (NLP) to audio and computer vision (CV), allowing businesses to reduce the time it takes to build and use AI models from months to hours. These AI models, known as Transformers, rely on machine learning algorithms that allow computers to understand human language, speech and images. The Transformers models are used for translation, intelligent search, speech recognition, and more, and Hugging Face allows businesses and developers to easily adopt these state-of-the-art models.
Core Use Cases:
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Large Language Models: Hugging Face Transformers and the Hugging Face Hub provide a large variety of open LLM models that can be deployed into conversational assistants and perform various tasks such as writing essays, summarising text, answering questions and more.
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Generative AI: Hugging Face Diffusers and the Hugging Face Hub provide a large variety of open models to create images, videos and audio using prompts and examples as input, such as Stable Diffusion XL.
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Semantic Search: the Hugging Face Hub offers a wide variety of state of the art pretrained models to create vector representation of text (embeddings) to power semantic search, information retrieval experiences on top of companies internal knowledge bases.
Key Advantages:
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Pretrained models: with a library of over 300,000 pre-trained models, developers have easy access to a wide variety of machine learning models for any modality, task, language or domain.
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Accelerating AI development: by using Hugging Face technologies, developers can train and deploy AI models in hours instead of months, allowing for rapid growth and development.
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Faster predictions: Hugging Face offers easy to use open source acceleration tools to deploy these AI models in the most efficient way, leveraging AI hardware accelerators such as AWS Inferentia 2, next-gen GPU or CPU.
Using machine learning, Hugging Face has developed advanced, pre-trained models for natural language processing. Businesses in France are experimenting with AI tools and technology, and more than half (57%) are specifically using AI to interpret and generate human language. The Hugging Face Platform rapidly increases access to the new digital future, allowing developers to easily build, train, and deploy AI models.