City of Vienna increases efficiency of public services with innovative AI solution

The City of Vienna’s IT department is dedicated to delivering projects that directly benefit residents, enhancing their quality of life and making the city a better place to live. At the heart of its digital strategy is its Digital Agenda, a 5-year roadmap focused on using technology ethically and responsibly to support the community.

With a growing demand for services and nearly a third of its workforce set to retire in the next 5 years, the city administration is focused on streamlining processes to deliver higher-quality services with fewer resources. The City of Vienna is investing heavily in emerging technologies like AI and modernizing its datacenter to allow for greater efficiency. As a public administrative body, the organization's work revolves around written laws and decisions that are maintained and stored–information that could be used to train a gen AI model. By building internal capabilities and maintaining control over its data, the City ensures its AI systems align with its human-centered values. To support its efforts, Austria’s capital city needed a modern development platform that would maximize flexibility, efficiency, and access of its AI solution to its employees.

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Wien Digital, adopted Kubernetes for container-based development, deploying Red Hat OpenShift in its datacenter for a standardized approach across the organization. Red Hat OpenShift offered a comprehensive platform for the department to develop, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. With the options to utilize on premise or in a cloud environment, the IT team relied on secure and scalable Red Hat solutions to layer on Red Hat OpenShift. The progress of the IT team moved them closer toward their goal of distributed AI-enabled services. The City of Vienna expanded to Azure Red Hat OpenShift—a fully-managed, turnkey application platform—to support WienKI, a new and exciting AI initiative. This tool uses large language models (LLMs) to serve as a virtual assistant, supporting employees in their daily work by responding quickly and accurately to requests and providing relevant data. The City is exploring how OpenShift AI—a machine learning (ML) platform that manages AI-enabled applications at scale across hybrid cloud environments—can help them further streamline their operations.

WienKI supplies employees with instant answers to work-related questions like, “How does this process work?” or “Who do I submit expense requests to?”. The AI solution answers questions from a growing and vast knowledge base comprising all available digital documentation. Looking ahead, the City of Vienna plans to integrate WienKI into additional processes, such as a digital citizen service. To ensure responsible use of AI according to the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, the City has implemented an AI compass for employee guidance. It adheres to the EU AI Act, with mandates that include keeping a human in the loop to verify accuracy and make final decisions.

“The City of Vienna is investing very heavily in digital humanism—the principle that everything revolves around people. We don't leave anyone behind,” said Benedikt Schraik, Chief Technology Officer, City of Vienna. “That means that we always think about what impacts our actions will have down the line. How does technology impact people? What do people think about it? What does it mean for people? We talk a lot about this internally.” 

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With Red Hat OpenShift, the City of Vienna can innovate faster, provide new services and functionality to the public, and maintain frequent release cycles. Two years after its initial release, WienKI has proven successful, helping employees work more effectively and respond more accurately to citizen inquiries and requests. 

With container-based systems and OpenShift’s capabilities, the City of Vienna has also increased the efficiency of routine IT administration tasks, such as software updates, security testing, and approval processes. Red Hat OpenShift provides greater transparency to support data-driven management decisions and streamline tasks. For example, by automatically deploying an additional container when a load increases, Red Hat OpenShift helps to boost productivity and operational stability. Taking full advantage of our open source solution helps employees and city residents by making its digital services more effective. 

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