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

Overview

Since 2023, Wien Digital, the City of Vienna's IT department, has worked with Red Hat to give the city's 70,000 employees access to WienKI (ViennaAI), an AI-based virtual assistant built on Red Hat OpenShift on premise and Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift. WienKI answers employees' work-related questions from a growing knowledge base of digital documentation. The city follows the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the EU AI Act, keeping a human in the loop to verify accuracy and make final decisions.

The challenge

The City of Vienna's IT department faced growing demand for services and nearly a third of its 70,000-employee workforce set to retire within 5 years, requiring streamlined processes to deliver higher-quality services with fewer resources while maintaining control over sensitive administrative data used to train AI models.

The solution

Wien Digital deployed Red Hat OpenShift on premise and expanded to Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift to build WienKI (ViennaAI), an AI-based virtual assistant using large language models that answers employees' work-related questions from a growing knowledge base of digital documentation. The City is exploring Red Hat OpenShift AI to further manage AI-enabled applications at scale.

Reported business value

Two years after its initial release, WienKI has helped employees work more effectively and respond more accurately to citizen inquiries and requests, and the City of Vienna has increased the efficiency of routine IT administration tasks such as software updates, security testing and approval processes.