The challenge
As in every local authority, staff in Annemasse were already using consumer AI tools (ChatGPT and the like) to save time on document work, but with no framework at all, and with internal documents, some of them sensitive, being sent to servers outside the European Union. An unacceptable legal and sovereignty risk for a public administration.
The goal: give staff a tool at least as practical as the AI products on the market, but one the authority keeps full control of (data, infrastructure, budget), without runaway costs and without depending on a foreign vendor.
The solution: a sovereign AI, operated end to end
🧠 An open source model, kept in house
The French model Mistral Small 3.2 (24B) served on European GPU infrastructure, with no dependency on a US vendor and no data leaving the controlled perimeter.
📚 Connected to the authority's documents
A full RAG pipeline (extraction, semantic search, re-ranking) and 5 thematic wikis: staff query their own working documentation and get sourced answers.
🔐 Sovereign by design
EU hosting, encrypted tunnel, daily wipe of the processing servers, authentication through the authority's SSO. The data stays under control.
🌱 Frugal and energy-efficient
The GPU infrastructure only runs during working hours and relies on a single GPU: sized to actual need, with no waste, for a controlled cost.
The results
- ✓ 340 active users and 17,880 messages processed since the beginning of 2026: real and growing adoption.
- ✓ More than 12 months in continuous production, with no dependency on a foreign supplier.
- ✓ "Territoire Innovant" award, AI category, presented by Les Interconnectés (June 2026, Paris).
- ✓ A reproducible model: the same foundation was then deployed across a whole département (Calvados).
"With MIA, we are showing that a municipality can control its own digital strategy without depending on external players."
Gabriel Doublet, Mayor of Annemasse (quotation translated from French)
Sources: annemasse.fr ↗ · one-year feedback (LinkedIn) ↗
The same result for your organisation?
A demonstration on your own documents, then a three-week pilot with 20 of your staff (go/no-go milestone included).