“Many of these municipalities are out in rural areas,” notes Johan Ekberg, Chief Executive Officer at IBM Business Partner Apendo AB. “Their populations are older, so their tax revenues were already shrinking before 2020, and COVID-19 has only made it more painful for them.”

Conversely, citizen expectations regarding the speed and efficiency of government services have only increased in the current digital age. And while adding staff may have been an option available in the past to deal with increasing workloads, these cities and towns now needed a strategy that could more efficiently interface with and deliver services to their citizens.

This challenge is what motivated Apendo to create a solution that could efficiently deliver digital-assisted citizen services. Rather than contacting a local call center or government office, residents would be able to request information or report issues via an intuitive virtual assistant that could be accessed through their smartphone or on the web without human interaction.

“In Sweden we have over 290 municipalities,” explains Ekberg. “And only a handful use any kind of a chatbot for citizens. It’s a huge market, and a perfect solution for balancing budget and service.”

By automating common interactions, users of ADA will be able to cut related citizen support costs without compromising service quality.

“We anticipate that mid-size municipalities should be able to save the equivalent of at least one full-time employee,” notes Ekberg. “And for one of the installations that we already have running, we project that municipality will reduce their incoming calls by 20% after the first two years. But it takes time to educate and shift the citizens to use the new ADA service.”

Beyond the efficiency increases, ADA also helps to improve the quality and timeliness of support, leading to more positive interactions with citizens. “Instead of 8–5 o’clock service, they now have 24x7 service,” adds Ekberg. “If they have a question on a weekend, they can get it answered then. They don’t need to wait until Monday morning.”

And with ADA beginning to penetrate the market, Apendo is pleased with its choice of IBM Watson and IBM Cloud Pak technology. “Robust, scalable, state of the art—that’s kind of the IBM platform,” continues Ekberg. “If I was a customer, and I was looking to buy a digital assistant, I would want a technology that was going to be around for a long time. You don’t want to spend time training a platform that will be gone in two years. You want something reliable. And we’ve used the IBM brand to instill that trust.”

Of course, Apendo finds value in its partnership with IBM beyond access to innovative technology. “We needed an easy way for municipalities to understand the cost,” explains Ekberg. “And by using an ESA we were able to disrupt the usual way of pricing these services. We invented a new consumption-based pricing model where users pay per citizen and per employee. Without the ESA and this new model, we wouldn’t have ADA.”