Artificial Intelligence in Municipal Services

Tamta Dokvadze, working in Rustavi Local Governance, Service Development. Proud member of Innovation Hub of Rustavi and Trainer of Electoral Systems

Before we move straight to Artificial Intelligence and Municipal Services, let me give you a bit of background about our team and what we are currently working on.

Welcome to Georgia! After 70 years of Soviet past, we re-started building our country 30 years ago, we started thinking about public services 15 years ago, implemented reforms in public sector and nowadays Georgia takes pride in its one stop shop public services provided in Public Service Halls and Community Centres nation-wide.

But, we only recently started thinking about municipal services which lack standardization and structure in contrast to public services.

Who are we? And how we connected AI and municipal services?

We are Rustavi Innovation Hub - a team of civil servants at Rustavi City Hall. Our journey also started recently.

Rustavi Innovation Hub is approaching the development of municipal services in novel ways, searching innovative decisions in municipal activities, talking to people and engaging them in the design of local services.

AI and municipal services

The biggest challenge working for municipal services, unlike working for Public (Governmental) Services, is the lack of resources. It turned out to be the biggest challenge for attaining our goal of spreading information about municipal services widely, finding online environment were municipality would place information,and making municipal services, and information about them easily accessible to wider public.

So we decided to create AI powered civil servant of Rustavi City Hall, now called C-Bot (City Bot). Staff from specific departments trained C-Bot and loaded all specific information about municipal services in its memory. It actually has answer to over 700 quires. Later C-Bot was integrated in Rustavians most favored and used online platform Facebook. If you visit Rustavi City Hall’s official Facebook page, you can ask anything about municipal services and C-Bot will reply to you instantly with the required information. With minimum effort and in couple of seconds citizens receive information for free. For example, construction permits are municipal services, if someone has any kind of question, how to get a permission, what is the required documentation or deadlines to adhere to, they easily can ask C-Bot in Facebook Messenger.

Rustavi is the very first Municipality using artificial intelligence for developing services in Georgia. We suspect AI powered civil servant is a novelty for public services as well. Rustavi is on its way to becoming the city of innovations for local governance. Have ideas? Have skills? Want to invest them in the work benefiting communities? You know where to find us.