Accenture has worked with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) to design, build and scale an AI Assistant that is transforming how thousands of staff work across its headquarters and delegations worldwide.
Since September 2025, Accenture has supported DG INTPA’s transition to AI-powered ways of working, developing a production-level capability that helps staff move faster on complex policy and funding decisions by unlocking institutional knowledge and freeing up capacity for judgement, policy analysis and strategic work. Launched in March 2026, the platform has already attracted more than 2,000 regular users generating upward of 400,000 queries across a broad range of topics.
Unlike off-the-shelf AI tools, the Assistant is tailored to DG INTPA’s specific terminology, procedures, policy priorities and working methods of the European Commission’s international partnerships function. It combines advanced language models with secure access to internal knowledge and documents, as well as internet connectivity, to deliver contextually relevant support to teams operating across more than 100 countries. helping to streamline routine activities and free up capacity for judgement, policy analysis and strategic work.
“Bringing together the European Commission’s policy leadership in international partnerships with Accenture’s technical expertise and delivery experience is a strong example of how AI can be deployed responsibly and at scale in complex public-sector environments,” said Gabriel Bellenger, Lead for Government Transformation at Accenture. “The real value lies not in the technology itself, but in embedding it into complex policy environments, governance frameworks and daily workflows. This is what turns AI into a practical capability for how organizations deliver outcomes.”
The program was developed with support from Accenture’s Brussels AI Lab, a dedicated facility opened in 2023 where public-sector clients can test and evaluate AI and generative AI solutions in a controlled environment before scaling to production. Security, resilience, normative alignment and responsible use were built into the platform from the outset. A people-centered approach has been central to the program’s design and rollout. As access expands, the focus is on training staff to use the Assistant responsibly, critically assess its outputs and apply appropriate human review.
This reflects a broader challenge facing public-sector organizations globally. Accenture research shows that while 70% of agencies surveyed have deployed advanced AI tools, only 35% are significantly upskilling their workforce to use them effectively. The DG INTPA program is designed to close that gap, creating more space for human analysis, policy reflection and strategic decision-making.
Looking ahead, the next phase of the program will introduce agentic AI to support defined workflows—moving beyond information retrieval into structured task execution. A structured end-user feedback mechanism will enable Directorate’s staff to rate responses and provide free-text comments, creating a clear feedback loop to keep improving the system. DG INTPA has identified a broad set of use cases to embed the Assistant more directly into core business processes, helping to streamline routine activities and free up capacity for judgement, policy analysis and strategic work.
