By Richard Humphreys |
The Nordre Follo municipality, located south of Oslo, Norway, had modernised its public hearings with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
The local government delivers public services for approximately 60,000 residents. The municipality was formed in 2020 through the merger of the former Ski and Oppegård municipalities. Nordre Follo oversees administrative processes that require public participation, including urban planning, building permits and zoning decisions.
Linda Mari Byström, enterprise architect at Nordre Follo municipality, has led the organisation’s AI adoption and worked alongside Aina Indal Shiri and planners in the urban development department.
“We began with introductory sessions on Copilot Studio and AI, sharing our vision that this tool will help us be more data-driven and increase transparency as a team,” said Byström.
Nordre Follo partnered with Atea, an IT infrastructure and services company headquartered in Norway, to build and deploy a ‘hearing agent’. The domain-specific AI solution, built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, uses Microsoft SharePoint for document storage and automation flows in Microsoft 365 to support the process.
When the municipality proposes zoning or infrastructure changes, citizens and organisations submit responses. Previously, responses came in as PDFs which caseworkers manually transferred into SharePoint where they would read each submission in detail, extract key themes and compose a summary. Summaries were then compiled into Word documents to be presented to decision-making bodies. Neighbourhood hearings could generate 40 to 50 submissions, while municipality-wide plans could garner over 150. Each submission could span six or more pages, sometimes with attachments.
Atea designed and implemented the hearing agent to support the municipality’s public hearing workflows. Citizens submit responses through structured web forms during a hearing period. These submissions are archived as PDFs in the municipality’s records management system, and then caseworkers upload the archived PDFs to a designated SharePoint library, where the agent processes each document.
The agent reads and interprets each submission, generating summaries that extract key themes, objections and regulatory concerns. It categorises inputs by topic, stakeholder type, and sentiment – identifying whether responses are positive, negative or mixed. After processing, the agent produces editable Word documents in a structured table format along with a consolidated report that includes thematic analysis.
“Our Copilot Studio–based agent organises incoming feedback, helps identify sentiment across responses, and supports faster creation of summaries,” said Byström.
Shiri added: “Every summary is reviewed manually, so we maintain full control over what appears in the document.”
A pilot ran through eight hearing cycles in a developer environment and was then validated for accuracy, before moving to full production in November 2025.
“The hearing agent has given us new ideas on how we can do things,” said Shiri. “When you’ve done things a certain way for a long time, you don’t always stop to question whether it’s the best way to do it.”
The municipality plans to move from Word and Excel to a low-code review application, with data flowing into Microsoft Fabric and Power BI dashboards.
“We have some ideas on how to integrate with Fabric so that the managers can better understand progress,” said Byström. “We also want to increase transparency so the public can see how we’re working.”