Industry veteran aims to unlock productivity gains for French organizations through expanded adoption of the Appian AI Process Platform.
Appian announces the appointment of Frédéric Godde as Regional Vice President of Sales for Appian France. With 20 years of B2B technology experience, Godde has in-depth knowledge of key industries, including banking, insurance, energy, telecoms, life sciences, and the public sector. These industries are under tremendous pressure to increase agility and competitiveness through digital transformation, but their innovation projects are hampered by increasing regulatory scrutiny and the need to prove compliance.
This appointment comes when Appian has just announced its strategy and roadmap for integrating generative AI into the Appian AI Process Platform. Appian values democratizing access to AI technology to unlock productivity gains for developers. The company’s strategy focuses on providing secure and reliable private AI to protect customer data.
France has embraced AI with an ambitious AI policy and launched a National Strategy for AI in 2018. More recently, French President Emmanuel Macron announced its commitment to become Europe’s AI hub with €500 million funding in creating AI “champions” of market and research leaders in the emerging technology, including €40 million investment to support generative AI projects in France. However, being part of the European Union, it is under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and data privacy is imperative. Many companies are looking for ways to leverage open-source AI yet retain control of customer and financial data with security and privacy.
As the winner of Grand Prix du Jury DIMS 2023 from the IMA (Innovation Makers Alliance) for outstanding achievement in excellence and performance of technological and digital innovation projects for the business, Appian works with French companies and organizations to automate business processes for transformative outcomes. For example, Département des Yvelines, a local government council, reduced contract creation and validation time by at least 50% with an automated contract generation process. The French National Rugby League decreased game-day hotline calls by 50% and legal workload by 24% from an Appian management and compliance app delivered in less than five months. Other Appian customers include:
- Nine of the world’s top 10 largest life sciences companies, including Sanofi.
- Five of the world’s top 10 banks, including an international banking conglomerate and a global asset management company in France.
- Leading global energy and utilities companies in France.
“The digital transformation of large organizations in France remains an ongoing challenge to develop their competitive edge, gain operational efficiency, and leverage the wealth of data that is too often siloed, ignored or forgotten due to old legacy systems and poor accessibility,” said Frédéric Godde. “French organizations could unlock productivity gains and accelerate their time-to-market by leveraging native integrations, embedded AI capabilities, low-code development and a single, homogeneous interface for their users for a total experience. With Appian, they have the option to host their applications in a private cloud with private AI. Our customers and partners are interested in this option to keep their data secure and private.”
As the Appian leader in France, Godde will scale the French ecosystem of Appian technology partners by collaborating with local and global systems integrators (GSIs) and consulting firms to drive growth and accelerate customer value. This is in keeping with Appian’s global strategy for partner-driven growth.
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“The Appian AI Process Platform provides a low-code design experience across a complete automation toolset with enterprise-grade security, reliability, and scalability for mission-critical applications,” added Charlie Thompson, SVP of EMEA at Appian. “As the third largest economy in Europe, we strongly believe that Appian can help more companies and organizations in France unlock their data with our data fabric, increase their productivity with AI process automation, and drive innovation and new business opportunities.”
Frédéric Godde holds an executive master’s of science in management from Emlyon Business School and another master’s degree from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Godde started his career at Xerox, then moved on to Verizon Business before holding sales management positions at Polycom and Fuze, where he was the Regional Vice President of Sales in France.