On municipal duty: the AI clerk has no holidays to plan

During the year-end holidays, residents need more information from their municipalities, while staffing levels are typically reduced due to leave. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, many municipal offices operate with shortened opening hours or declare an administrative recess, even though this is often the period when the highest number of questions arrives from local residents.

The now almost default option of digital administration clearly speeds up procedures. It is no coincidence that in 2024, 70 percent of the EU population aged 16 to 74 used a public authority’s website or app in the previous 12 months to deal with administrative matters online. At the same time, another survey shows that, despite email and various apps, 63 percent of municipalities still struggle to answer all incoming citizen letters and enquiries on time, while in roughly 90 percent of cases the answers could in principle be found elsewhere, for example on the municipality’s own website, said Erik Czinger, Hungarian head of Munipolis, the smart communication network already used by hundreds of municipalities in Hungary.

One possible solution is an AI-based customer service assistant that can independently answer almost 90 percent of incoming questions, 24 hours a day, potentially in several languages, using an information set tailored specifically to the given municipality. Its capabilities become particularly visible during the Christmas break. This generative, continuously learning artificial intelligence is not a simple chatbot but operates as a real on-call service. It reads and writes, understands human speech and talks to callers in a natural human voice, patiently and clearly. It uses the municipality’s own official information to respond to questions, whether they are about holiday waste collection schedules, Christmas tree pick-up, out-of-hours medical services, parking rules or New Year’s Eve fireworks. No special database has to be built for it, because it can access the municipality’s website and “knows” the current regulations and by-laws, while residents can ask their questions exactly as they would formulate them to a live clerk.

According to Erik Czinger, the model of exclusively in-person customer service is becoming increasingly unsustainable and unnecessary in many areas worldwide. “Emergency hotlines clearly need humans, but simple information-giving does not. Many municipalities are already struggling with staff shortages, and the people working at town halls deserve their Christmas break just as much as anyone else. Residents, on the other hand, feel the most uncertain exactly at this time of year, when customer service hours, service schedules and holiday opening times all change at once. Experience shows that an artificial intelligence-based assistant can provide fast, accurate and polite answers to every question that does not require real weighing of options or an individual decision, so it is precisely the typical holiday-period customers who benefit the most. The goal is for a resident of an average Hungarian town to receive the same quality of information within a few seconds at Christmas, at midnight or on an afternoon between the two holidays as they would at the counter on a crowded customer service day – only without the long wait. And all this at a time when the physical doors of the town hall are closed.”