On May 22nd, the 17th edition of the GIFEC Meeting was held, focusing on Artificial Intelligence. What impact will AI have on our activities? How can we redefine human values in the age of machines? What about cybersecurity and data protection? These were just some of the questions addressed by the speakers, who aimed to demystify this technology to businesses and the industrial sector.
AI: a driver of reindustrialization?
For over 50 years, the GIFEC has been supporting manufacturers of industrial products. To address their questions and prepare for an unprecedented transition toward AI, the interprofessional group chose to focus this meeting on opportunities. Of course, risks and potential misuses must be anticipated—but not at the expense of the pressing need for change.
As a GIFEC partner and President of MEDEF, Patrick Martin set the tone in his opening speech: "Industry will only be reborn if we equip ourselves with the right skills and know how to organize innovations that will allow us to take the lead again."
Continuing the momentum of MEDEF’s “AI Tour of France,” he emphasized the importance of making these technologies accessible and integrating them concretely into industry. Actively reindustrializing France must become a priority once more, especially for younger generations. This requires investment, training, and the revival of strategic expertise.
Beyond large tech corporations, artificial intelligence is a matter of survival for businesses. More than 200 professionals attended the event to engage with these critical issues.
Toward AI applied to french industry
AI, when addressed in generic terms, holds little relevance for the industrial sector. It must always be tied to specific use cases. That was the key message delivered by Asma Mhalla, PhD in political science, associate researcher at the EHESS/CNRS Laboratory of Political Anthropology, and lecturer at Sciences Po, École Polytechnique, and Columbia GC.
In her talk, she clearly distinguished AI applied to industry (logistics, robotics, cobotics…) from its use in other domains such as healthcare, stressing their distinct challenges.
She pointed out that the mainstream discourse on AI often obscures this industrial reality in favor of a more sensationalist narrative (such as general AI or AGI). Yet the real stakes are production capacity, sovereignty, and economic power. In a partially deindustrialized Europe, we risk falling into strategic dependency—particularly on American cloud giants.
In this context, French manufacturers face a dilemma: they must adopt AI to remain competitive, but the turnkey solutions come from foreign hyperscalers (large-scale data centers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud), thereby threatening their technological autonomy.
The answer? Strategic reindustrialization, paired with sovereign innovation. Without it, Europe will be unable to protect its interests or remain globally competitive. We must move beyond purely regulatory approaches and restore a strong, reality-based industrial vision.
3 key challenges and just as many real-world applications
The 17th GIFEC Meeting provided an opportunity to showcase projects carried out by fourth-year engineering students from ESILV – École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs Léonard de Vinci. Over a six-month period, several student teams, mentored by long-standing GIFEC members, explored how AI can positively impact the industrial sector. Their goal: to design algorithmic models that address concrete, real-world problems.
1 – Leveraging customer data through predictive analytics
This project demonstrates how artificial intelligence can be used to anticipate industrial sales. Using historical sales data provided by GIFEC member companies and cross-referencing it with macroeconomic indicators (such as metal prices, inflation, etc.), the team developed a predictive model capable of estimating sales trends with high accuracy.
The model is paired with an impact simulator that allows manufacturers to test how changes in a key variable—like the price of oil—might affect their results. This tool enhances commercial planning, stock optimization, and medium- to long-term strategic forecasting.
This project won first prize for its relevance and operational effectiveness.
2 – Securing professional email systems
In response to the growing threat of email-based cyberattacks, this project offers a simple yet effective solution to protect industrial companies. The core idea: an email analysis tool powered by artificial intelligence that automatically detects suspicious URLs.
Each link is assessed for its risk level, and messages identified as malicious are redirected to a secure folder. Once installed, the system operates automatically in the background, with a threat detection rate of 99%.
Easy to deploy, this solution addresses a critical need for industrial SMEs, which are often underprepared when it comes to cybersecurity challenges.
3 – Anticipating demand to optimize production
This third project tackles a concrete challenge: how can industrial production be adjusted to match actual demand, while avoiding overstocking or shortages? The team collected and cleaned sales data before testing various predictive models.
After several iterations, the selected model proved capable of forecasting production volumes with sufficient accuracy. The goal: to provide manufacturers with more precise control over their production chain, enabling them to better respond to market shifts while keeping logistics costs in check.
Is risk-taking still possible in a hyperconnected world?
This was one of the questions raised in the second part of the event by author and philosopher Mazarine Mitterrand Pingeot. Can risk-taking—an essential part of the business world—truly flourish in a networked world where we are constantly being observed? Should we disconnect from the network in order to generate new questions?
For Mazarine Mitterrand Pingeot, the inability to formulate new questions is one of the core issues with AI—and, more broadly, with a hyperconnected society where questions are imposed, and the only real choice is to either perpetuate them or disconnect entirely. The importance of the questions we choose to ask had already been emphasized earlier by Asma Mhalla.
The ability to generate new thoughts and to ask questions outside the established framework is one of the uniquely human traits we must strive to preserve—as a shared resource for the future.