City of Vienna: 'WienKI' AI Assistant (Red Hat OpenShift) Helps 70,000 Employees Cut Process Lookup Time, 2 Years After Launch

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City of Vienna: 'WienKI' AI Assistant (Red Hat OpenShift) Helps 70,000 Employees Cut Process Lookup Time, 2 Years After Launch

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Since 2023, the City of Vienna has worked with Red Hat to deploy WienKI (ViennaAI), an LLM-based virtual assistant built on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift, that helps the city's 70,000 employees quickly answer work-related and citizen-service questions. Two years after launch, WienKI is helping employees respond more accurately to citizen requests, and the City is planning to extend it into direct citizen-facing services, in line with the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the EU AI Act. "The City of Vienna is investing very heavily in digital humanism — the principle that everything revolves around people. We don't leave anyone behind," said Benedikt Schraik, Chief Technology Officer of the City of Vienna. "That means that we always think about what impacts our actions will have down the line. How does technology impact people? What do people think about it? What does it mean for people? We talk a lot about this internally." The City of Vienna is facing a workforce squeeze: services demand is growing and nearly a third of staff will retire in the next five years, forcing the administration to deliver higher-quality services with fewer people. The IT department also sits on a large, well-structured body of written laws, decisions, and internal documentation — a natural fit for generative AI. The city's Digital Agenda, a 5-year roadmap, calls for ethical, responsible use of technology, and IT leadership was determined to build internal AI capability rather than depend on opaque external services. Wien Digital, the city's innovation-led IT department, adopted Kubernetes, deployed Red Hat OpenShift in its datacenter, and expanded to Azure Red Hat OpenShift to support WienKI. The assistant uses large language models to answer employee questions like "How does this process work?" or "Who do I submit expense requests to?", drawing on internal digital documentation. The city implemented an AI compass for employee guidance, follows the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, and adheres to the EU AI Act, including a human-in-the-loop mandate to verify accuracy and make final decisions. At operational scale, OpenShift gives the city faster release cycles, more transparent data-driven management, and more efficient routine IT administration — from software updates and security testing to approval processes. By automatically deploying an additional container when load increases, OpenShift supports productivity and stability. The same platform foundation is now being used to explore OpenShift AI for further streamlining. Looking ahead, the City of Vienna plans to integrate WienKI into additional workflows, including a digital citizen-facing service, while keeping humans in the loop. The architecture is positioned as a template for any public-sector organization that wants to deploy AI on its own terms: own the data, control the platform, and let technology serve people rather than replace them.