By Alice Chambers |
Bolzano, a city in the South Tyrol province of North Italy, has created an AI-powered companion and portal to support its citizens with access to healthcare and housing information.
The province built its infrastructure using Microsoft tools on Power Platform and used Microsoft Foundry to construct its AI apps to manage data and citizen interactions.
The myCIVIS portal, built by public IT service provider Sudtiroler Informatik AG(SIAG), lets citizens use voice, web or digital messaging to get answers to questions and access services by communicating with EMMA, the multilingual AI companion built with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
“We did a lot of user testing, and we found that typically the citizen didn’t know what services might be available to them,” said Hedwig Unterfrauner, head of competence center WEB for SIAG. “Thanks to these new technologies, citizens can now access information in a direct and natural way, as if talking to someone, without having to read and interpret complicated service descriptions to understand what might be right for them.”
The new system compiles citizen data across provincial and federal agencies. If a citizen opts to use it, they can use myCIVIS to understand the services that they qualify for. For example, if you have a child with a learning disability, the feature will list the support services available and how to get them. If you’re a farmer who qualifies for a crop subsidy, the answer will be there before you even ask. Requests, if not immediately fulfilled, will be monitored in real time.
Any citizen who does not want to use the AI service can opt out. The myCIVIS stem is in beta testing and will go live in March 2026.