January 27, 2026 France is preparing to phase out Zoom, Teams and other foreign videoconferencing platforms across its public sector. The plan is to replace them with a single, state-controlled system designed to secure official communications and reduce reliance on non-European technology.
The shift was announced on Jan. 26 by David Amiel, Minister Delegate in charge of the Civil Service and State Reform, who confirmed that a new tool called “Visio” will be rolled out nationwide to all government departments by 2027. The platform has been developed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) and is intended to become the single videoconferencing solution used by French civil servants.
Amiel presented the rollout plan during a visit to a research site operated by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Gif-sur-Yvette, alongside DINUM chief Stéphanie Schaer and CNRS deputy CEO for science Alain Schuhl. The government’s objective, he said, is to eliminate dependence on “extra-European solutions” while strengthening the confidentiality of public communications.
Today, many French administrations rely on a mix of tools such as Teams, Zoom, Webex and GoTo Meeting. Officials argue that this fragmented setup weakens data security, locks the state into foreign infrastructure, increases licensing costs and makes inter-ministerial collaboration more complex. Visio is meant to replace that patchwork with a harmonized system that is fully controlled by the French state and built on domestic technologies.
The platform is not starting from scratch. After a year-long pilot, Visio already counts around 40,000 regular users and is now being deployed to roughly 200,000 public servants. Several major institutions are set to adopt it at scale in early 2026, including CNRS, the national health insurance system, the Directorate General of Public Finances and the Ministry of the Armed Forces. CNRS alone plans to drop its Zoom licenses by the end of March, affecting 34,000 employees and about 120,000 affiliated researchers.
Security has been central to Visio’s design. The system was developed with the backing of the National Cybersecurity Agency of France and runs on sovereign cloud infrastructure hosted by Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes, certified under ANSSI’s SecNumCloud standard. It also integrates AI-based meeting transcription using speaker-separation technology from French startup Pyannote. Real-time subtitles are expected to be added in 2026 using tools developed by AI research lab Kyutai.
Beyond security and sovereignty, the government is also highlighting cost savings. According to official estimates, replacing paid software licenses with Visio could save about €1 million per year for every 100,000 users migrated.
