Source: Microsoft
Headline: Nuclear fusion: Delivering on the promise of carbon‑free power with the help of AI
Jean-Daniel Delaplagne is the IT Section Leader for ITER. He has been with the organization for 15 years.
ITER has been a longtime Microsoft client, he said, with Office 365, Windows servers, and other Microsoft tools in use throughout the organization. But in the past year that use has expanded in new directions.
“One of our targets was to connect with our knowledge base here in a better way,” Delaplagne said. “We have 20 years of knowledge — more than 1 million documents.”
His team fine-tuned an Azure OpenAI Service chatbot designed to make mining that database easier. ITER has been working with Microsoft partner Witivio to make the link between that knowledge platform and the Microsoft 365 Copilot through agentic features. An example of an “agentic element” is a tool specifically designed to translate the hundreds of acronyms ITER uses.
Delaplagne said that the chatbot has been very helpful in a variety of ways.
“In the end we have been getting quite good quality of answers on very technical knowledge of ITER,” he said. “It’s not just good at finding documents, it’s good at finding information within documents and the meaning of different aspects of engineering and construction.”
After an initial use phase of Microsoft 365 Copilot with 50 beta testers, ITER is expanding to more than 300 Copilot licenses with plans to add more, Delaplagne said. Copilot is also being used for administrative tasks like initial evaluations of CVs as well as for purchasing and inventory.
Azure OpenAI Service is also being used to make a history of all the IT tickets on file searchable. He said ITER typically has 40,000 requests for IT help each year. Making the history of all those help requests and solutions searchable could speed up the resolution of common issues; he said the system has been well-received so far. He also said health and safety officers have used Copilot to draft inspection methodologies and checklists, including generating open-ended questions.