Banque des Territoires (CDC Group) x Polyconseil x Hugging Face: Enhancing a Major French Environmental Program with a Sovereign Data Solution

Source: HuggingFace Date: 2024-07-09 URL: https://huggingface.co/blog/sovereign-data-solution-case-study

Summary

Case study: Banque des Territoires (CDC Group), Polyconseil, and HF build a sovereign RAG system for France’s EduRénov program (energy renovation of 10,000 public schools). Stack: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 + TGI on NumSpot (French SecNumCloud-certified infrastructure), RAGAS for evaluation, human validation before email sends. Pilot completed; open-source LLMs on French infrastructure demonstrated as sovereign alternative to commercial AI.

Implications

Thread: HF as open-source ML hub. French public institution requirements around data sovereignty are a concrete forcing function: commercial AI APIs are not an option when data must stay on French-certified infrastructure. This case study is a reference architecture for European public sector AI — open-weight model + self-hosted TGI + sovereign cloud is the pattern. The RLHF feedback collection through the human validation step is the forward-looking design choice: the system improves as agents validate responses. Watch whether NumSpot + HF becomes a standard pairing for French and broader EU public sector deployments.