BOLZANO, Italy – The history of the province of Bolzano is as dramatic as the Alpine landscape it occupies, peaks and valleys seemingly without end.
Before World War I, Bolzano was a part of Austro-Hungary, an even bigger melting pot of cultures and languages. Now it’s a semi-autonomous province of Italy, with its own ways of doing things.
The majority of its 550,000 residents speak a dialect of German as their mother tongue. But a third language, Ladin, is spoken in some valleys.
“In a way, Bolzano is like a little Europe,” said Stefan Gasslitter, a native of the province and the general director of its public IT service provider, SIAG. “We have different languages, different cultures, and what I like is that really enriches life here. You can take the best of each.”
In his view, this juncture of cultures and languages is fertile ground for innovation. Gasslitter and his team are working with the provincial government and Microsoft to use technology to shift a bureaucratic paradigm.
The idea is to put the needs of the customer – the citizen – first. To do that, the province of Bolzano is creating a user-friendly portal supported by an AI companion and sophisticated data analysis to help citizens find what they’re looking for and to tell them up front what kinds of support and aid they can get, all in a one-stop shop.
The province built its digital infrastructure using a suite of Microsoft tools on Power Platform, a low-code, cloud-based system that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure. It used Microsoft Foundry to construct its AI apps to manage data and citizen interactions.
At the heart of this transformation is the myCIVIS portal, where citizens can use voice, web or digital messaging to get answers to questions and access to services by communicating with EMMA, the multilingual AI companion built with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Here, a citizen will be able to directly access provincial services, including health care information and needs.
The new system will compile all the available data about a citizen that already exists across provincial and federal agencies. If a citizen opts to use it, the proactive AI feature in myCIVIS will describe the services for which they qualify.
If, for example, 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. The result is less guessing, less waiting and fewer lines.
“This was one of my dreams, to close the gap between citizen and public administration, to rebuild trust,” said Gasslitter, who leads Sudtiroler Informatik AG (SIAG), known in Italian as Informatica Alto Adige S.p.A. “Because when you have the data, the citizen has the possibility to really interact directly with the government.”
Gasslitter noted that privacy is a fundamental issue – any citizen who does not want to use the proactive AI service can simply check a button and opt out. The rebuilt myCIVIS system is in beta testing and will go online in March. He said that the province has been a Microsoft client since 2016, and continuity and trust were key in deciding to rely on its services in this new venture.
Stefan Walder is the head of Bolzano Province’s housing authority, and he and some of the employees of the department are among those testing the new platform. The department gets more than 2,000 requests for housing assistance each year. He said institutions like the one he directs aren’t always easy to change.
“When you make a change to a a public administration, it’s always going to get into political and social sensibilities,” he said. “For some of us, this won’t be the case. But for many others it might be.’’
Some workers are worried about their jobs, he said. Others are simply worried about doing things differently.
Considering the new technology itself, Walder said it was already showing promise and convincing many workers of its utility.
Even before introducing the new myCIVIS platform, his team had seen how AI in the form of Microsoft 365 Copilot (the province’s government has 5,000 Copilot licenses with plans to add more) was helping to make the job of answering citizens’ housing assistance queries faster and more straightforward.
“They have already seen what our AI tool can do in terms of interacting over the telephone with citizens, answering different kinds of questions with less effort,” he said.
Walder notes that Bolzano, like the rest of Italy, faces a demographic bottleneck: Many older workers are retiring, while there aren’t enough younger workers in the next generations available to replace them. The AI chatbot on the myCIVIS platform will ease that pressure by handling frequently asked questions first, improving the experience for each resident while leaving more time for staff to deal with their needs directly.
“Using AI, you can get a faster and more efficient summary of all the requests that the citizens send them,” Walder said. Because the new system saves data, it learns what the most frequent questions are. “This will allow us to be more effective overall in giving the right responses.”
This mirrors the hopes Josef-Thomas Hofer has for the public administration of Bolzano. He has been the director of the Province of Bolzano’s IT Department for four years, and he’s overseeing the province’s digital transformation.
Like Stefan Gasslitter of SIAG, with whom he works closely, Hofer came into government from the for-profit sector.
“I transferred some of these concepts from the private business world basically to the public administration,” he said. “It’s putting the customer at the center and making a choice to be proactive rather than reactive. I think what we’re doing is pretty innovative, and this is why we’ve gotten funding from the EU.”
The Province of Bolzano received funding for Progetto Bandiera (Project Baniera, part of an Italian economic program known by the acronym PNRR, supported by the European Union). Hofer said the funds were granted because of the innovative approach the province had taken in using AI and other digital tools in building the myCIVIS portal and for the implementation of a fraud management platform.
“Microsoft plays a crucial role in the work we will be doing, for example, on health care,” he said.
There are seven hospitals in the region, and Hofer and other Bolzano officials plan to make them a showcase for how health care can use AI tools and data analysis to better serve patients and even researchers.
The hospital in the town of Merano is in a pilot program as a “hospital of the future” with a variety of AI tools being used to help doctors spend less time on bureaucratic tasks and record keeping and more time treating patients.
The myCIVIS system already includes some medical support. For example, some health records are available to citizens online.
Markus Perger, 40, is a native of the region who works for a tech startup in the city of Bolzano called touristinfo.ai. Perger demonstrated how he uses the myCIVIS portal by logging into the system and highlighting the range of services he has access to. He explained that, while the platform offers multiple features, the one he uses the most often is secure access to his medical records.
“The simple notes from a doctor visit used to all be on paper,” he said. “Now, if I need something, I can go in and download whatever is needed.”
Touristinfo.ai is part of the NOI Techpark incubator program of the Province of Bolzano. It is also part of the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. The startup is using provincial and other databases to provide visitors with information on public transport, lodging and attractions to plan their stay as they wish.
He cites that as an example of how the province is embracing technology in the big picture. But he also likes the way the province is looking to help people like him, his wife and their two children.
“I think we’re moving in the right direction with the digital initiatives,” Perger said. “To connect all the publicly available data, to make it connect to your personal data set, it’s going to be very helpful to us.”
Hedwig Unterfrauner is the head of the Competence Center WEB for SIAG – her team builds the front-end of the myCIVIS platform.
Unterfrauner was elected to a council of assessors in Feldthurns, near the city of Bolzano, where she interacts directly with the village’s other 3,000 residents. “It’s a perfect equilibrium because in that role I’m in direct contact with families and they come to me with their problems, and in the world of IT, I spend a lot of time behind the laptop or PC.”
She said that “we did a lot of user testing, and we found that typically the citizen didn’t know what services might be available to them.”
That could range from school scholarships to housing assistance to farm and business assistance. “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.”
For Alessio Trazzi, it’s crucial to ensure that the technology in use remains human-centric. As the chief AI officer at SIAG, Trazzi is one of the key players building the myCIVIS platform, as well as working on other aspects of Bolzano’s digital transformation.
He noted that the way the myCIVIS system is being built, “a human-in-the-loop” approach ensures oversight: In cases that are complex, citizens will be directed to human operators to resolve issues. All AI-driven components are supervised and continuously improved by data scientists and AI engineers. “The goal is simple: an easy, accessible, natural-language experience, available 24/7,” he said.
Trazzi and his wife have a 4-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter. He said he always has them in mind as he’s helping design a system that will continue to evolve with the sweeping changes that AI is bringing to the world.
“When I describe what I do, I say I’m a computer science engineer and a father,” he said. “I’m always thinking about what I can do as a technician and what I can ask for as a father and citizen. So when I think of my boy and girl, I’m always thinking, we have to keep the human side of the technology. That idea is always present in our project.”
