AXA has appointed Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet (pictured) as group chief human resources officer and a member of its Management Committee, effective Sept. 1, 2026.
She will be responsible for all HR activities led at group level, including talent management, compensation, social relations, HR operations, culture and diversity, learning and development, and HR for AXA's headquarters, reporting to Karima Silvent, deputy general secretary.
The appointment is notable for the breadth of Panosyan-Bouvet's career, which spans corporate insurance, retail real estate, and, most recently, French national politics. She left the French National Assembly in August 2026, just weeks before joining AXA, having served as Minister for Labour and Employment from 2024 to 2025 under the Barnier and Bayrou governments.
Panosyan-Bouvet's professional path started at AXA itself, where she worked as an M&A project manager between 1998 and 2001. She then moved into senior management roles at insurer Groupama from 2002 to 2014, followed by leadership positions at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield from 2015 to 2022, during which she also served as a member of Air France-KLM's supervisory board.
Her career has also run through the French public sector. She advised the Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs on economic attractiveness and international investment between 2014 and 2015, was elected to the National Assembly for a Paris constituency in 2022, and was appointed Minister for Labour and Employment in September 2024. After leaving that post in December 2024, she was tasked by the prime minister with a mission on economic attractiveness before departing parliament entirely in August 2026.
Thomas Buberl, AXA's chief executive, said he was delighted to welcome Panosyan-Bouvet to the group and its Management Committee, adding that her extensive professional experience, knowledge of the industry, and strong convictions around culture, lifelong learning and diversity would be significant assets for AXA's next strategic plan.
Karima Silvent, to whom Panosyan-Bouvet will report, previously held the group HR director role herself before being promoted to deputy general secretary in October 2025, specifically as AXA began preparing its next strategic cycle. That sequencing means Panosyan-Bouvet's appointment fills a vacancy created by an internal promotion tied to strategic planning, rather than a departure or reshuffle prompted by performance concerns, and places her directly under someone who understands the HR function from the inside.
Panosyan-Bouvet has also been active in the non-profit sector, having chaired the mentoring association Proxité on a voluntary basis between 2016 and 2019, and currently sits on the board of Forces Femmes, an organisation supporting women's economic reintegration. She is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, HEC and Harvard's Kennedy School.
Appointing a former labour minister to lead HR is a distinctive choice for a company the size of AXA, and one that plausibly reflects a deliberate bet: someone who has recently sat on the other side of the table from employers, setting national labour policy, may bring a different lens to questions of workforce culture, social relations and talent strategy than a purely corporate HR background would.
Whether that translates into a meaningfully different approach at AXA specifically will likely become clearer once the group's next strategic plan, which Buberl explicitly linked to her appointment, takes shape.
