"We believe that AI fluency is important for employability”, says French unicorn

Being fluent in AI is “important for employability”, according to a top tech executive with a leading French unicorn. Aymeric Augustin, CTO, Qonto, a French business banking fintech, says that more than half of Qonto’s 1,600 staff are using GenAI as a work tool, increasing from zero use to over 50 per cent in around four months.

Augustin says it will help its employees be more employable in the future.

He said:

“We believe that AI fluency is important for employability."

He added that Qonto hopes to have soon around 70 per cent of its staff using GenAI tools. Qonto staff are using the French GenAI tool Dust, which tailors AI assistants for companies, plugging into large-language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Dust’s assistants connect to a company’s data and documents.

As a use case, Augustin says Qonto was using Dust to sift through weighty documents, find key information and summarise the document, saying it speeded up a previously human-driven process from 15 minutes to one minute.

Paris-based Qonto, which undertook a €486 million Series D funding round in 2022, is also embedding AI into its products.

One example of this is offering its customers the opportunity to create personalised logos during the wait time when they are onboarding to Qonto.

He also said that around half of the customer enquiries are answered via AI.

Hackathons have resulted in AI spiralling in popularity of AI within Qonto, Augustin says.

He said:

“One thing that has sparked a lot of enthusiasm is when we have done hackathons, we have done two GenAI hackathons in the past month.”

On whether French startups are more advanced in their use of AI than other European startups, he said:

“I would say there is a long tradition of French AI because of the long tradition of the French with maths.

“Most people running fintechs have been in that environment at some point in their lives. I think this makes us a fertile ground.”