City of Vienna Gives 70,000 Employees the WienKI AI Assistant on Red Hat OpenShift

Wien Digital, the City of Vienna's IT department, has worked with Red Hat since 2023 to give the city's 70,000 employees access to WienKI (ViennaAI), a virtual assistant based on large language models, according to a Red Hat customer success story. The city faces growing demand for services while nearly a third of its workforce is due to retire within five years, and its Digital Agenda, a five-year roadmap, commits it to using technology ethically and responsibly. Because a public administration's work revolves around written laws and decisions, the city saw that stored information as material for a generative AI model, and it chose to build internal capabilities and keep control over its data. Wien Digital adopted Kubernetes for container-based development and deployed Red Hat OpenShift in its datacenter as a standard platform, alongside Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift in the cloud. WienKI runs on this platform and answers employees' work questions, such as how a process works or whom to submit expense requests to, from a growing knowledge base made up of all available digital documentation. The city is exploring Red Hat OpenShift AI to manage AI applications at scale across its hybrid environment. To use AI responsibly under the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, the city introduced an AI compass to guide employees and follows the EU AI Act, including keeping a human in the loop to check accuracy and make final decisions. "The City of Vienna is investing very heavily in digital humanism, the principle that everything revolves around people," said Benedikt Schraik, the city's chief technology officer. Red Hat reports that two years after its initial release WienKI is helping employees work more effectively and respond more accurately to citizen inquiries. OpenShift has also made routine IT tasks such as software updates, security testing and approvals more efficient, and it adds containers automatically when load rises. The city plans to integrate WienKI into more processes, including a digital citizen service.