aiLights - AI @ Swiss Cantons | Valais
Artificial intelligence is steadily entering cantonal administrations — but how can the public sector deploy AI while keeping full control over sensitive data?
The Canton of Valais has built AVA, a sovereign AI platform that keeps all data within Swiss jurisdiction and sends nothing to hyperscale cloud providers. Built on open-source infrastructure and open-weight models, AVA stands for a clear commitment to transparency, digital sovereignty and service in both official languages of the canton.
This talk offers a concrete look at how the Service cantonal de l'informatique designed, developed and operates AVA, now in production for cantonal employees and soon available to citizens of the canton, accessible from the web, desktop and mobile. Florian Bersier, Head of AI for the Canton of Valais, walks through the full technical stack and presents applications already in daily use: AVA Juriste for legal research and drafting, an audio-to-minutes transcription and pipeline, and assistants for HR, SAP and parliamentary research.
A second focus is the shift from conversational to agentic AI: assistants that act on documents rather than only discuss them, integrated with the office suite to draft, summarise and export directly into the tools staff already use without data ever leaving the sovereign perimeter.
The session also covers what user feedback revealed about real priorities, and Valais's position in the national debate on digital sovereignty, closing with an outlook on the roadmap ahead.
15 minutes of Q&A follow the presentation.
Speaker:
Dr. Florian Bersier
Florian is Head of AI for the Canton of Valais, where he leads the canton's sovereign AI programme. He holds a PhD in Complex Systems from the University of Oxford and an MEng from École Polytechnique, and brings a decade of experience in AI and agentic systems, having founded and led a startup in the Google Workspace ecosystem.
📅 Date & Time: 29.09.2026, 9:00-10:00
⏱️ Duration: 60 minutes
🌐 Language: English
🗣️ Format: 45 min. presentation + 15 min. Q&A
📍 Location: Live on Zoom, YT
👥 Target group: Public administration & policymakers, technical professionals (AI practitioners, developers, data specialists), academia (researchers & students), anyone interested in AI
The series "AI @ Swiss Cantons" is supported by egovpartner.
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