Florence BRACHET-CHAMPSAUR joined SNCF in 2018. Over the past few years, she has defined and implemented a particularly ambitious and innovative heritage development strategy within the railway group. Antoine Roland recently sat down with her to look back on her career and discuss the various innovation projects she has spearheaded.
1. AR – First of all, could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
FBC – I’ve been involved in the worlds of business and heritage ever since I was a student. First, I graduated from the EM Lyon business school, then undertook a history thesis at the EHESS on Les Galeries Lafayette. This dual approach enables me to approach the world of business and its history in a unique way. It fosters both a practical and academic outlook, enabling me to weave fruitful and dynamic links between a company’s projects and its history.
Before joining the SNCF, I was Director of Heritage and Historical Archives, as well as Head of Patronage at Galeries Lafayette. During this time, I was responsible for setting up a conservation policy for the group’s archives, opening them up to a research audience and developing a range of actions to promote them to the general public (creating store tours, initiating a cycle of exhibitions in France and abroad, then curating exhibitions, etc.).
In 2018, as SNCF celebrated its 80th anniversary (see this fascinating video which retraces the company’s history), I joined the company to consolidate and close this beautiful event. This anniversary was a real turning point for the rail company, and a sign of the French people’s attachment to it. Since its creation in 1937, the company has been part of French history, taking part in all the events that have taken place. As the pride of French industry, it has played a full part in the history of mobility and regional development. With this in mind, the SNCF decided to create a department dedicated to heritage. I joined this dynamic to define the framework of this strategy and to make the SNCF a major player in national heritage.
The strategy I’ve proposed is the result of “culture shock”. I was particularly struck by the group’s strong culture of innovation (the railroads came out of the industrial revolution in the 19th century, and the SNCF was the first company to launch an e-commerce site in 2000). Beyond a nostalgic vision, I quickly became aware of the potential of heritage as a new ground for innovation. This roadmap could first and foremost rely on an internal ecosystem, a solid digital department and an extensive territorial network of digital factories: maisons digitales 574.
2. AR – Could you give us a few examples of the innovative projects you’ve led?
FBC – In 2019, a first project was launched with the FAB AR/VR. With this center of expertise, which provides innovative tools to facilitate the group’s digital and technological transformation, we have begun to create various virtual tours: those of a Bunker built in 1937 under the Gare de l’Est, and then, that of the Orient Express. They make the SNCF’s heritage accessible to all.
Following on from these initial achievements, I wanted to accelerate this strategy through a dopen innovation approach by collaborating with external players such as the Skyboy studio for a VR tour of the Gare de Lyon clock tower, and the heritage incubator of the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN). This collaboration with this cultural operator brought together two major players in the French heritage sector. Together, we selected a class of start-ups in 2020 to collaborate on joint innovative experiments. Despite the health crisis, we were able to select 3 start-ups thanks to this call for applications: Lumeen, Blumenlab and TIPSmeee. For example, Lumeen has developed a virtual tour of the Occitanie Yellow Train for EHPADs. These tours are offered to groups of seniors, with the help of a mediator, to take a virtual but collective journey that stimulates memories, encourages an escape from everyday life and creates a real moment of conviviality.
The health crisis has also forced the SNCF to completely dematerialize our relationship with the public for the 2020 edition of the European Heritage Days. This project was launched in close collaboration with Schoolab. to develop, in record time, a digital content platform to promote heritage: patrimoine.sncf.com. At the launch of this platform, we enriched the online experience by developing a firstchatbot with Ask Mona in the form of a quiz. Since September 2020, the platform has been permanently available and enriched with new content.
3. AR – You recently carried out a project involving the use of artificial intelligence and the enhancement of archives. Can you tell us about it?
FBC – Following this first collaboration, I kept in touch with Marion Carré, founder of Ask Mona. Together we talked about how Ask Mona was now using GPT chat functionalities to provide access to culture. Convinced of the benefits, we decided to launch a new project with this company for the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine 2023 (September 16 and 17): X 3 800.
To implement this projectwe have built up a corpus on the history of the railroads, delivered in July, from historical archives and secondary sources: transcription of the podcasts Chemin de fairepodcasts, scientific articles from the magazine produced by the Rails & histoire association, and teaching aids. This corpus enabled ChatGPT’s generative artificial intelligence to be fed with scientific sources and trained, while ensuring the reliability of the information for the public. By September, the chatbot was open for public testing.
So, for the first two weeks of September, our heritage platform platform attracted over 50,000 unique visitors (compared with 17,000 last year),thanks to a launch during the European Heritage Days (when railway heritage is particularly visible over the weekend), communication on social networks and a widely distributed press release.
On the strength of this success, the idea is now to enrich the X 3800 chatbot’s corpus with Ask Mona, and to rethink the platform in order to highlight the numerous contents with search tools, and to think about uses and visit itineraries.
These various collaborations, both in-house (experts and employees) and with numerous external partners (start-ups or cultural institutions), demonstrate the diversity of approaches that the heritage sector can envisage for implementing innovative heritage enhancement projects. Thanks to Florence BRACHET-CHAMPSAUR for the generosity of her sharing and her availability.
