A 220,000-Person Company’s Tactics for Keeping AI Costs Down

Businesses looking to expand their internal use of artificial intelligence from a select few testers to a large number of workers are hypersensitive to increased costs. Over the last couple of years, that has meant many of their AI projects have never made it out of the pilot phase.

Veolia, a 220,000-person provider of water treatment, waste management and energy services, seems to have found a middle ground. While the company, a spinoff of Vivendi based near Paris, has rolled out an internal chatbot to all of its employees, it has chosen to limit the number of staff that can access certain features, like image-generating tools.