GenAI: the organisation whisperer

Very unobtrusively, artificial intelligence has already begun to transform organisations.

A “start-up”. That’s how Florian Lagardère sees his team at Allianz France. The term says a lot about the freedom of data scientists and data engineers within organisations to innovate, try, fail, succeed and be entreprenial. “The other units are my internal customers and we need to approach them or propose projects to them,” says the head of the Big Data AI Factory. “Of course, projects also come to us from the top, from the Group and the ExCom, but it’s very Glimpse, a SKEMA Business School magazine important to be free to go directly to users, so we can understand their needs and what’s holding them back, and propose appropriate projects,” says Lagardère, who is doing just that to advance the Group’s transformation.

A REVERSED DEMAND

But when it comes to transformation, “the wind is turning”, says Jean-Baptiste Girardin, his counterpart at Malakoff Humanis. Since the arrival of generative AI, “there has been a huge change,” he says. His colleague, Jean-Luc Leblond, talks of “reorganisation”: the budget has changed sides. “Before, we had a budget to demonstrate a project’s value and then sell it to the business lines; now the approach is evolving, and business lines have increasing control over the budget for these matters. We depend on the challenges facing business lines to be able to trigger the use cases identified beforehand.” With the ever more widespread use of AI via generative AI, demand has reversed.

“Nowadays everyone has AI projects and experiments are being carried out left, right and centre, so we sometimes feel dispossessed,” says Jean-Baptiste Girardin. And even if Jean-Luc Leblond thinks it’s “normal for AI to become widespread”, it must be said that the changing role of men and women in data is one of the unforeseen effects of GenAI. Is this a form of the “machine” effect of technology? Without anyone really making a decision, it has begun to transform the organisation.