In 2024, the interministerial digital management (Dinum) continues the proactive administration project launched in 2021, while local authorities accelerate their adoption of technological building blocks that were long reserved for large metropolitan areas. The movement now affects medium-sized municipalities, with projects that go beyond mere dematerialization of forms.
Generative AI in municipal services: use cases already in production
The most notable trend during this period concerns the deployment of generative AI solutions for routine administrative tasks. According to feedback compiled by the Banque des Territoires and the Data Publica Observatory, a growing share of local authorities uses generative AI on a daily basis: drafting letters, summarizing minutes of municipal council meetings, preparing deliberations, or conducting legal research.
These uses are not isolated experiments. They are being integrated into services that handle a high volume of standardized documents, where the time savings per agent can be measured concretely. The legal affairs departments and general secretariats are among the early adopters.
The news published on the Collectivité Numérique website regularly documents these field returns, which help measure the gap between institutional announcements and the reality of deployments.
The question of the reliability of generated responses remains open. Local authorities that have taken the plunge report the need for systematic human proofreading, especially for legally binding documents. The risk of language model hallucination necessitates a validation process that not all organizations have yet formalized.
Governance of territorial data: the structural project of 2024
Behind the AI projects, an older problem resurfaces: the fragmentation of information systems remains the primary technical barrier. Most local authorities operate with siloed business software, acquired over various terms, and rarely interoperable.
Building an AI project or simply cross-referencing data between services (urban planning, civil status, social action) requires a unified technical foundation. Local authorities making progress in this area share some common characteristics:
- A centralized data reference framework, with shared naming and updating rules among departments
- A dedicated data quality manager or small team, distinct from the traditional IT department
- A clear doctrine on data openness (open data), which also conditions the ability to feed analytical tools
Field feedback varies on the actual pace of this structuring. Metropolitan areas have the human and budgetary resources to recruit data profiles. Medium-sized municipalities, on the other hand, often have to pool these skills at the intermunicipal level, which extends implementation timelines.
Digital sobriety and cybersecurity: rising regulatory constraints
The digital transformation of local authorities is now framed within a more demanding regulatory context. Cybersecurity has shifted from a technical issue to a political risk for local decision-makers. Ransomware attacks against hospitals and town halls, highlighted in recent years, have accelerated awareness.
Local authorities must deal with IT budgets that have not been sized to simultaneously absorb the costs of application modernization, staff training, and security compliance. The budgetary trade-off between new digital projects and strengthening existing defenses constitutes a recurring dilemma.
Digital sobriety and environmental responsibility
The REEN law (Reduction of the Environmental Footprint of Digital Technology), which requires municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to develop a responsible digital strategy, adds another layer of constraint. The affected local authorities must integrate environmental criteria into their equipment purchases, hosting choices, and the lifespan of their equipment.
The available data does not yet allow for measuring the actual impact of these strategies on the energy consumption of municipal IT parks. Initial assessments should emerge in the coming fiscal years.
Training territorial agents in digital skills: the bottleneck
Underinvestment in training hinders transformation more than the lack of software. The IT departments of local authorities often remain confined to maintenance and network operation tasks, lacking technological monitoring capacity or change management support.
The France Relance plan allocated 88 million euros for the digital transformation of local authorities in 2021. Part of this funding targeted tooling, but the training and change management components captured a more modest share of the financing.
- Front desk agents, in direct contact with users, need to master the e-services they are supposed to promote
- Middle managers must understand data issues to lead cross-functional projects
- Elected officials themselves need a minimum level of digital culture to make investment priority decisions
Several regional support platforms, such as those coordinated by prefectures, offer awareness modules. Their territorial coverage remains uneven, and feedback from agents on these programs varies by region.
The upskilling of territorial teams conditions local authorities’ ability to leverage the deployed tools. A user relationship management software, no matter how effective, produces no results if the agents using it have not been trained to exploit its features. The challenge of 2024 is no longer technological but organizational, and the local authorities that are making progress are those treating training as a structural investment, not as a residual budget line.
