After an Indian company, it is the turn of a French company to replace part of its employees with artificial intelligence. Onclusive, which carries out media monitoring for professionals, intends to eliminate a large number of positions. Objective presented by the CEO, Rob Stone, in an email dated September 5 and consulted by Libération: “Become more agile and more competitive” with “new technologies – and new tools that will streamline [the] operations […] and improve the ‘efficiency and precision’ of the company.
217 positions are affected out of the 447 “people employed in France in all companies” of the group. In detail, 209 employees should be made redundant, 8 vacant positions left without replacement and 23 “new positions would be created”. “We are introducing new technologies and new tools that will offer our customers a faster and more reliable service,” argued, for his part, Matthew Piercy, president of “Reputational Intelligence France” of Onclusive, last Friday. Among these clients are “several CAC 40 companies, but also the French State”, mentions Libération.
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In two years, the company, formerly managed by Kantar and sold to the investor Symphony Tehcnolgy Group (STG), has managed to carve out a prominent place in media monitoring. “Artificial intelligence is only part of the significant modernization that we are undertaking on new obsolete systems and infrastructures that we inherited from our founding companies,” explains Onclusive to Le Figaro.
For employees and unions, it’s a cold shower. “It’s a bad social idea, but it’s also a bad economic idea. On certain tasks, machines cannot replace humans. It does not have its relevance, its subtlety. Human beings are capable of filtering and refining the flow of information. And then, it has the knowledge and the relationship with the customer, something that AI will never have,” confides an FO delegate to Libération.
For its part, the company defends itself and assures “that the implementation of this project was not decided lightly”. Onclusive will thus organize “ten preparatory meetings with elected officials”, “experts will assist the Social and Economic Committee” and “a specialized company” will work for “the reclassification” of the employees concerned. For now, the info-consultation, which began on September 15, will last three months. The first departures will then take place in January and will last until June 2024.