“The goal of our digital transformation is to create business performance, whether for commercial efficiency, operational chain productivity, or building a sustainable and robust organization – through both our technology and cultural organization.”Vincent Wang, Chief Digital Officer of the Legrand Group
Legrand is a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures. Their purpose is to improve lives by transforming the spaces where people live, work and meet by delivering electrical and digital infrastructures and connected solutions that are simple, innovative and sustainable. The Group’s 38,000 employees are spread across 90 countries; its products are distributed in over 200 countries.
Legrand manufactures electrical wiring devices, lighting controls, cameras, switches, and a vast array of other items. Their product information is highly complex and granular. It must be translated into some 40 languages and constantly updated. To accomplish this, the company needed new generative AI solutions capable of creating product content in seconds to enable customer service and sales teams to quickly provide the right information to customers.
Legrand partnered with Artefact’s teams of data and AI business and engineering experts to create and launch Gaia and Elia, two complementary new GenAI products.
Elia is a Gen AI-powered agent that provides enhanced product information to customer support and product managers, with future plans to open it to the public. Elia can instantly answer questions about Legrand’s products, write content for sales and communication managers, and help build customer arguments.
Gaia is also a Gen AI-powered application that enables data managers to enrich product information by generating marketing content, and to fill in gaps in product sheets where data is missing to ensure product sheet integrity. Gaia assists in producing quality data rapidly in multiple languages, enhancing content creation processes and accelerating deployments.
Challenge: Leverage GenAI technologies and deliver products at scale to enhance workforce and performance at Legrand
The first step in the process of building Gaia and Elia was to demonstrate to Legrand’s top management the benefits of generative AI technology. To ensure a thorough understanding of GenAI and its potential applications, Legrand spent several sessions exploring the technology with their ExCom, showing how it could create value across the Legrand entities. “We showcased concrete cases and demos created by our teams to illustrate how GenAI can be adapted to the Legrand context,” notes Vincent Wang, Legrand CDO, responsible for the Group’s digital strategy and transformation.
Legrand’s HR department also played an important role, enabling the launch of company-wide awareness and acculturation sessions to help create the mindset shift needed to move even the most dubious employees from curiosity to conviction about the value of GenAI. The most active users in the organization were named “AI angels” to help others create AI solutions.
Once management was on board, Legrand and Artefact decided on an ambitious, fast-paced, hybrid team approach featuring expert profiles from both sides working together to develop proofs of concept (POCs) and then produce minimum viable products (MVPs) for two generative AI products with the aim of rapidly industrializing them.
The multidisciplinary team was composed of a dozen people from Legrand and Artefact. Strategy experts created business cases, tracked value over time, and oversaw all change management implications. Product owners supported the delivery of the two products. Data engineers worked on data structuring and pipeline, including connectivity with the Azure OpenAI API, part of Microsoft’s architecture. And data scientists specialized in algorithmic work, while data analysts managed all indicator aggregation and publication through dashboards.
“We worked in three-week sprints where we reviewed all the features we needed to develop. It took about six months to complete the two MVPs. Ensuring a transfer of skills to the Legrand teams throughout the project was also a priority.”Julien Ho-Tong, Partner at Artefact
Rapid delivery of two new GenAI products, Gaia and Elia: a pragmatic approach with concrete benefits for both employees and customers
Gaia is short for “Generative AI Agency”. It was designed to automatically generate enriched product content in multiple languages, allowing data and marketing managers to complete missing or generate new product information and perform integrity checks on batches of a hundred or more products simultaneously.
According to Christophe Sirieix, Data & AI Manager at Legrand, “Thanks to Gaia, a customer can easily search for specific product documentation or find a reference from a product description. The tool guides the customer step-by-step through the installation of the products.”
Gaia has already proven to be a real asset when it comes to satisfying increasingly demanding customers in terms of information accessibility. Gaia allows for a more comprehensive combination and uniformity in generated results: In user tests, when Gaia-generated data was compared to previous manually-generated content, there was an 83% satisfaction rate with the Gaia-generated content.
Elia is a virtual agent that makes product information more easily accessible and simplifies product installation for users (retailers, technicians, installers and consultants). Currently reserved for internal use, the tool will be made available to the public in the near future.
Elia is a self-care solution that:
Elia currently covers 10% of the Legrand product catalog. The goal is to cover 100% of the catalog by the end of the year. A business case shows projected profitability by early 2025.
Results: a trust-based partnership between Legrand and Artefact, successful tool adoption, and industrialized deployment on the horizon
“What we appreciate about Artefact is their partnering mentality: we’ve forged a “One Team” spirit. We work together to define the roadmap, planning, and delivery, and we’re jointly responsible for quality and delivery management to ensure we optimize our efforts and meet business expectations,” states Vincent Wang.
Legrand’s deployment strategy is really an expansion strategy. They begin with the most mature countries to create the core product, then aim to deploy it globally, in all countries, taking into account local needs and specificities, thanks to generative AI technology. In this way, Legrand ensures that all its teams benefit from every solution.
“The feedback from our business teams is very encouraging and we want to continue developing this type of solution for our internal teams and our customers,” says Christophe Sirieix. “Today, our teams have adopted the tool they tested. The goal is to industrialize it and offer it to other Group subsidiaries. Hence the industrialization approach: to stabilize the solution technically, put it into production and scale it up.”
Elia and Gaia mark a significant step towards Legrand’s digital transformation. By combining AI and GenAI, they make product information more accessible, increase employee productivity, and improve the overall user experience.
“What we are most proud of is our people; what really matters isn’t the number of features or platforms we’ve developed or the number of countries we push to, but how we’ve developed as a group: the maturity of our understanding of GenAI technology and its value,” concludes Vincent Wang.
For a deeper dive into the ways companies are leveraging generative AI, watch Vincent Wang, Julien Ho-Tong and Xavier Perret (Director, Cloud Azure at Microsoft) as they discuss “How to augment the workforce with GenAI” at Artefact’s Adopt AI Summit on June 5th, 2025.
