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France’s Ministry of the Economy and Finance announced the generalization of Visio, a videoconferencing platform developed by the government’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM), with the stated goal of making it the default—and ultimately exclusive—video meeting tool for French public servants by 2027. The policy aims to end reliance on “extra-European” services such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and Google Meet, citing concerns over data sovereignty, confidentiality of government communications, and exposure to foreign infrastructure, laws, and political pressure.
French officials framed the move as part of a broader digital sovereignty strategy intended to reduce strategic dependencies and improve resilience across ministries and public bodies. Visio has already been piloted at scale (reported as tens of thousands of users, including ~40,000 regular users) and is being expanded toward broader adoption across the state; the plan includes not renewing external videoconferencing licenses once Visio is fully in routine use. The Register reporting echoes the government’s rationale and notes that major public-sector entities (including tax and social security bodies) have begun transitioning away from US-based platforms.
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The government said deployment of Visio would continue through 2027, expanding from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand public employees. Officials also said the transition should reduce licensing costs, with estimated savings of about €1 million per year for every 100,000 users migrated.
Officials said automated captioning would be added to Visio in 2026, complementing AI-based transcription and speaker separation already highlighted in the rollout. The government emphasized that these features would avoid sending audio to third-party cloud services.
According to a DINUM press release, France said it would accelerate plans to reduce dependence on US software by moving some state workstations from Windows to Linux-based systems. Officials said a broader strategy covering workstations, collaboration tools, antivirus, AI, databases, virtualization, and network equipment would be formalized later in 2026.
France said it would replace platforms including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Google Meet across the public sector, and that external videoconferencing licenses would no longer be renewed. The government said the rollout would expand across ministries and agencies, with Visio becoming the default and ultimately exclusive tool.
On January 26, 2026, the French government announced it would generalize Visio as a secure, sovereign videoconferencing service for public-sector employees. The move was framed as a digital sovereignty measure to reduce exposure of official communications to non-European providers and foreign legal regimes.
France's Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) developed the open-source videoconferencing platform Visio, with contributions from the Netherlands and Germany, and tested it with tens of thousands of civil servants. ANSSI also supported security hardening, and the platform was integrated with the state's secure messaging environment.
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