François-Xavier Enderle, Groupama’s Director of Transformation, announced this at the beginning of December. Applications of generative AI within the group are arriving. The insurer has just formalized GESICA within its Groupama Épargne Salariale entity.
GESICA, acronym for Groupama Épargne Salariale Artificial Conversational Intelligence, is therefore a conversational robot or chatbot intended for employees. The solution uses ChatGPT, but to put it in its own sauce in a Groupama GPT version.
GESICA integrated into employee Teams
This is explained in a joint video by Jean-Christophe Benzo, general manager of Groupama Épargne Salariale, François-Xavier Enderle and Pascal Desseaux, head of Data & IA Factory infrastructures at G2S (Groupama Supports and Services).
Like Axa before it, the insurer is therefore equipped with an internal chatbot based on ChatGPT and hosted on a private Azure instance from Microsoft. For access to GESICA, Groupama has opted for integration into Teams, the publisher’s collaborative tool.
GESICA’s function consists of answering “our employees’ questions about employee savings in order to save them time in their daily research.” To obtain this information, the chatbot therefore draws exclusively from the company’s documentary database.
“It’s ChatGPT with Groupama sauce,” insists Jean-Christophe Benzo. “We wanted to create our tool (…) with our own bases, to specifically answer our questions,” continues the manager.
And this to specify once again that GESICA operates in a closed environment. “We must be reassured, GESICA does not go on the Internet at all. She responds only on the basis of the knowledge communicated to her,” assures the general director.
Robot confined to the internal document base
This mode of operation is a way to protect against hallucinations, but also to protect data confidentiality. “Data is our heritage. So we keep them at home,” explains François-Xavier Enderle.
“I am convinced that this technology can be of valuable help to our employees in many areas, particularly in customer relations: Facilitated documentary research, preparation of responses, synthesis of dialogues…” explains Jean-Christophe Benzo.
The manager also wants to be reassuring towards customers and employees. We promise, customer relations have not been completely disrupted by the introduction of a chatbot.
“We consider that AI is a tool that helps our employees but does not replace them. Our customer relationship remains centered on human-to-human communication,” he emphasizes. Finally, Groupama, through its transformation director, declares that GESICA constitutes the “beginning of a very long series” of use cases on AI.