Driving Internal Productivity with Dust: Lifen Saves up to Two Hours per Week per Employee

Lifen, a major player in e-health in France serving nearly 800 hospitals, partners with Dust to deploy AI-specialized assistants across the company. With its 100% cloud-based solutions, Lifen uses artificial intelligence to change the way health data is accessed and used in both clinical research and patient care. By integrating Dust's platform, Lifen extends its AI capabilities beyond its core products, equipping internal teams with tools to experiment with generative AI.

About Lifen

Lifen is a prominent healthcare data company based in France that specializes in digital health and focuses on the secure structuring, sharing, and utilization of healthcare data. Lifen was founded in 2015 and has rapidly grown to be a leading player in France’s e-health sector.

With over 800 hospitals and 20,000 independent healthcare professionals relying on its tools, Lifen plays a critical role in changing how healthcare data is accessed, structured, and shared. This commitment to making healthcare data more manageable and impactful positions Lifen at the forefront of digital health innovation.

Artificial Intelligence Has Been Part of Lifen’s DNA from the Start

From its inception, Lifen has embedded artificial intelligence (AI) into its core operations. Its suite of tools has analyzed more than 76 million documents to date, converting them into structured data that is both accessible and reusable.

Each day, Lifen's AI identifies and analyzes over one million data points, achieving an impressive 98% accuracy in automatically detecting patient information within medical documents. The company’s mission is clear: to make healthcare more efficient and data-driven, particularly in complex environments where information security and workflow integration are crucial.

This foundational commitment to artificial intelligence made Dust a natural partner as Lifen sought to explore new ways of leveraging artificial intelligence for internal productivity and automation.

“Exploring AI & LLMs for internal productivity was a no-brainer for us because "AI" is a technology we developed from day one at Lifen in our product. It was hence natural to explore how Gen AI could be applied internally because AI is core in Lifen's DNA” - Raphaël Brousse, VP Of Operations at Lifen.

The Journey to Choosing Dust for Internal Productivity

Before engaging with Dust, Lifen initiated an internal "phase d’acculturation"—a company-wide exploration of AI tools, led by their Chief of Staff, Louise, to identify the right platform and build internal alignment. The goal was to align the entire organization around AI, identify the most promising use cases, and find internal champions to lead AI adoption across various departments. This phase included an internal hackathon where almost all of Lifen's 160 employees participated, identifying use cases and building solutions to address challenges raised by their colleagues.

“The hackathon was an incredible success,” Raphael recalls. “We saw almost all Lifeners take part, and it created this amazing energy and excitement around AI. It became clear early on that our biggest priorities were security, workflow integration, and personalization.”

These priorities were non-negotiable because Lifen operates in healthcare, an industry with strict data security requirements, therefore any AI solution had to ensure the utmost security and confidentiality. They also needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate into their existing tools and could be tailored to unique operational challenges. After evaluating several solutions, Dust was the clear winner for Lifen.

“Dust not only checked all the boxes we needed, but it went much further. The flexibility and personalization capabilities were game-changing, and the integration with our internal public data sources made it an incredibly powerful tool for us.” Raphaël Brousse, VP Of Operations at Lifen.

Integrating Dust into Lifen Employee’s Workflows

Once the decision was made, Lifen began integrating Dust into its systems. The Tech and Operations teams co-owned the process and worked together to build no-code workflows using Make (a tool for automating tasks). The integration was smooth, with Dust aligning perfectly with Lifen’s existing infrastructure.

As business users often struggled with building workflows on their own, even with no-code tools Lifen established a central team dedicated to creating workflows and ensuring that all teams could fully leverage Dust’s capabilities.

To further support adoption, Lifen created a dedicated Slack channel and Notion page where employees could share their AI assistants and seek help from colleagues. “We made sure that each department had AI champions,” Raphael explained. “These champions were key to driving adoption and ensuring that people had the resources they needed to build assistants or troubleshoot problems.” 

The champions from different departments worked autonomously, building custom AI assistants using Dust’s platform. Throughout this process, there were no major technical hurdles, and the team was able to quickly bring AI-powered enhancements into their workflows.

Accelerating Data Management with Dust AI Assistants

Lifen has developed several specialized AI assistants using the Dust platform, with three standout examples designed to address challenges in customer support, legal matters, and internal knowledge sharing. These assistants demonstrate the power of AI to streamline processes and save countless hours across various departments.

“Approximately one-third of Lifen employees use Dust every week. Some people build assistants and share with others to use, while others use the raw LLM. And this number will grow because any new employee is onboarded directly on Dust”

_ Raphaël Brousse, VP Of Operations at Lifen.

Dust for Customer Support: Zendesk Integration

One of the most impactful AI assistants developed by Lifen using Dust platform was designed by Alexy from their Customer Support team. This assistant helps support agents respond to customer queries more efficiently by integrating with Zendesk.

When a customer submits a support request through Zendesk, the AI assistant processes the request, understanding its context within the complex healthcare environment. It then searches through Lifen's extensive knowledge base, which includes medical terminologies, healthcare regulations, and product-specific information. The assistant creates a tailored suggestion for the support agent, including:

• Steps to resolve the issue
• Relevant articles or resources
• Context regarding the user (previous issues raised, role, experience with Lifen Products)

This assistant has significantly reduced the time support agents spend on complex issues, freeing them up to focus on more high-level customer interactions.  It enables support agents to provide faster, more accurate responses to healthcare professionals and administrators, who often deal with time-sensitive and critical issues. It has also proven particularly helpful for addressing rare or unfamiliar cases, where finding the correct information quickly can be a challenge. 

According to Raphael, the feedback from the Customer Support team has been overwhelmingly positive, with agents praising the tool for streamlining their workflows and increasing the accuracy of their responses.

Dust for Legal Support: Sales Contract Guidance

In healthcare, there are lots of legal complexities, and understanding all of them, especially for sales representatives negotiating contracts—can be a time-consuming and daunting process. “Our legal framework is complex. Being a sales rep or even a legal talent at Lifen is challenging considering our legal constraints” Raphael explains. To address this, Lifen’s Head of Legal, Barbara Benssoussan, developed a specialized AI assistant using Dust platform.

This Dust AI assistant helps the Sales and Legal teams by guiding them through the complex legal requirements of contracts. The specialized AI assistant engages in a dialogue with sales representatives, asking questions to understand the specific legal context of a potential deal. It then provides tailored advice to the sales rep after considering legal nuances like healthcare data protection regulations, specific country/region healthcare laws, and much more.

For a healthcare data company operating across multiple regions, this AI assistant is invaluable. It allows Lifen to reduce legal risks in customer agreements and ensure compliance with varying healthcare regulations. 

Dust for Internal Knowledge Sharing

Lifen has also implemented an innovative use of Dust through a Slack integration. By using a 🔮 emoji in Slack, Lifen employees can trigger a specialized AI assistant that searches through internal documentation in Slack and Notion, provides quick answers to employee questions, and suggests relevant links to more detailed information.

This specialized AI assistant addresses a common challenge in fast-growing tech companies – the fragmentation of internal knowledge. "This is useful for support teams like IT, Data or RevOps, which maintain lots of processes and have a lot of run" Raphael notes.

Results: the Impact of Dust AI Assistants Across Lifen’s Teams

Since implementing Dust, Lifen has seen both qualitative and quantitative improvements across various departments. Two primary areas of impact are time savings and team productivity.

“One of the things that impressed me about Dust is that all the use cases around internal and external support for teams who need to maintain processes are impressive. Being able to call an assistant that parses all the knowledge is a huge pain reliever.” - Raphaël Brousse, VP Of Operations at Lifen.

For the Sales and Legal teams, Dust’s AI assistant for contract guidance has had a significant impact, particularly in reducing the amount of time spent on legal inquiries. By providing sales representatives with quick, accurate advice, the assistant helps streamline negotiations and ensure that contracts are legally sound.

Across all departments, Lifen estimates that Dust saves employees up to two hours per week on routine tasks, particularly in meeting recaps and follow-ups from transcripts. This translates into hundreds of hours saved across the company, allowing employees to focus on more strategic, high-value work.

Building an AI Culture at Lifen with Dust

The success of Dust at Lifen has had a positive effect on the company’s strategic decisions. By integrating AI into task management, documentation, and other routine workflows, Lifen hopes to further reduce the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks. 

“Dust is a very powerful tool that can be part of every productivity challenge we face, it is now considered systematically in every workflow/automation we build” - Raphaël Brousse, VP Of Operations at Lifen.

Looking ahead, Lifen’s leadership plans to rely on its central team of RevOps and tech leaders to stay updated on advancements in AI and large language models (LLMs). This team will continue to identify the most impactful use cases and ensure that the company remains at the forefront of AI integration.

By empowering its teams with AI assistance, Lifen is improving its internal processes and setting new standards for innovation in the healthcare technology sector. This will ultimately lead to better patient care and accelerated clinical research.

As Lifen continues to grow and expand its use of AI, Dust will remain a key partner in its journey toward greater efficiency, innovation, and excellence in healthcare.