What is the genesis of the agreement?
It is an agreement to support the deployment of AI, which is effectively a social dialogue agreement as it establishes a subcommittee of the central CSE (Social and Economic Committee) of the UES (Economic and Social Unit) which covers 5,300 of the group’s 10,500 employees. Signed on 5 November, this is a somewhat experimental two-year agreement set to run until the end of 2027. We waited for its implementation before announcing it: our first committee meeting took place on 5 February. We initially defined an AI roadmap at a strategic level in late 2024. We used an external provider to map developments in our relevant sectors: real estate, social housing, and construction. Management then identified several priority areas based on this mapping and experiments conducted by certain employees and departments. Examples include predictive maintenance for lifts and managing residential moves for our tenants—for instance, when a family grows. This is a challenge facing all social landlords. We also see significant opportunities in document management, as every home represents a file, and we manage 560,000 of them. Finally, there is a focus on employee efficiency, and we hope to introduce an HR chatbot in the future.
An AI charter to define usage rules for staff and group commitments
In September 2025, CDC Habitat adopted an AI usage charter (attached) following a favourable opinion from the CSE. It requires employees to undergo mandatory awareness training and prohibits the use of AI systems not approved by the group. It also calls for data security vigilance, limiting AI use to where necessary to ensure “environmentally responsible use”, and verifying AI-generated results.
