It's summer, in the operations room of the Dordogne fire service. Franck is watching a row of screens. Suddenly, a video appears: above a forest, a thin plume of smoke.
No one has called the emergency services yet. A camera saw it, and an artificial intelligence raised the alert.
Far from the spectacular announcements, this is one of the most useful applications of AI there is. And it is spreading in France.
How it works
In the Dordogne, twelve cameras are installed on water towers and high points across the department. They rotate on their axes and scan the forested areas continuously.
An artificial intelligence analyses their images. As soon as it spots what looks like smoke, it sends the video to an operator. If the fire is confirmed, the firefighters set off immediately. This summer, the cameras proved useful on several occasions, notably during a fire at Cornille.
The system has been in place since summer 2025. Its purpose is simple: to spot a fire earlier, so it can be tackled before it becomes uncontrollable.
Gironde and Côte-d'Or too
The Dordogne is not alone. In the Gironde, since last year, it is the AI that raises the alert from cameras installed on high points, including old watchtowers originally built for human spotters. It detects smoke or a heat anomaly at distances of up to around twenty kilometres. It took a training period before it became reliable.
In the Côte-d'Or, a camera installed on a mast on Mont Afrique monitors a radius of 30 kilometres all around it. It arrived at the right time: this summer the department had a record season, with more than 250 fires recorded by the prefecture.
The real difficulty is not seeing the smoke, it is not getting it wrong. In the height of summer, a tractor harvesting raises huge clouds of dust that look, from a distance, like a fire starting. The Côte-d'Or camera has learned to tell the difference between the smoke of a fire and the dust of agricultural work. Without that sorting, the firefighters would be swamped by false alerts.
Why it works so well
This system ticks every box for AI done right. The task is precise: spotting smoke. A mistake is immediately obvious. And above all, a human confirms before the emergency services set off.
The AI does not decide. It watches everywhere at once, without tiring, and saves the minutes that matter. Judgement remains with the person who knows the terrain.
There is also a nice irony in this story. The watchtowers, where people once scanned the horizon, have not disappeared. Today they carry the cameras that have taken over.
What to take away
With global warming, forest fires are more frequent and more violent, including in regions that were little used to them. Every minute gained at the start of a fire can save hectares from burning.
We often talk about what AI costs the planet. It can also help it, and this is where it shows most clearly: a discreet technology that watches, that alerts, and that leaves a human to decide.