How a single use case shows what AI can do in public administration

It was not a major digitalisation offensive, not a million-euro funding project. It was simply a task that needed to be done – and the question of whether it could be approached differently this time.

The Building Regulations department of the city of Espelkamp faced the task of producing a comprehensive progress and impact report for an urban development project under the "Soziale Stadt" ("Social City") programme. The report had to cover nearly two decades of work – from 2007 to 2026. The submission deadline to the district government was tight. The scope of the undertaking was considerable.

Tasks like these frequently end up with external consultants in municipalities. It is often not the most comfortable, but the most obvious solution: too time-consuming, too document-heavy, too far outside day-to-day operations. In Espelkamp's case, the estimated cost for outsourcing was around €15,000.

A new option

Since this summer, the AI platform Intric has been available to all employees of the city of Espelkamp. It was introduced and is managed by the E-Government specialist team – a small unit that had first tested the platform during a trial and project phase and tailored it to the administration's needs. The platform runs in the provider's dedicated cloud and requires no significant IT staffing resources.

When the commission for the impact report arrived, the E-Government team decided to try a different approach.

How it worked

The team drafted a carefully worded input prompt and used it to set up a dedicated AI assistant – equipped with more than 30 project documents, some of them very extensive, that had accumulated over the years relating to the urban development project. This deliberate restriction to the relevant body of knowledge also had a practical advantage: it keeps computing capacity usage within manageable bounds – a detail that carries real weight with regular use.

The entire process – from the design and configuration of the assistant to the preparation of documents and the professional support of the Building Regulations department – was carried out independently by the team, without external support.

What the assistant then delivered was not a first rough draft or a rough outline: it was a complete, structured report draft that the Building Regulations staff could review professionally, supplement, and finalise. Every statement in it could be traced back to the source documents – a quality that not only ensured traceability but also built trust in the finished document.

The result

The report – eleven pages, official, ready for submission – was completed within a single morning. The total internal workload came to just under five hours.

In this way, a single use case had recouped more than half of the annual licence costs for Intric. A calculation that is immediately understandable even for sceptics.

What this case means

For the team itself, the value of the project lay not only in the financial. It was also proof that employees in public administration can take complex knowledge work into their own hands with AI – without sacrificing traceability or quality in the process. What is particularly remarkable is the timeframe: Intric had been in productive use for barely two months at that point. The fact that such a tangible, measurable benefit materialises so quickly is by no means a given – and counters a widespread hesitation around AI adoption in the public sector: that the added value would only show itself in the long run.

This is not a given. AI adoption in the public sector needs practical proof, not promises. It needs examples that show: this works, this is manageable, and this delivers results.

Espelkamp has provided such an example – and one that is explicitly aimed at smaller and medium-sized municipalities as well. Roland Schlömer, E-Government coordinator for the city, summarises the experience as follows:

"It was important to us from the very beginning that we could operate the platform independently – without having to rely on external support at every step. At the same time, the exchange with Intric is close: feedback from everyday working life can feed directly into further development. This makes such a tool a realistic option even for municipalities without a large IT department. All the more significant, then, that a platform like this can be deployed – and used productively and responsibly – with limited staffing resources."

There is also an effect that is harder to put into numbers, but is at least equally important: such a tangible use case carries acceptance of this kind of tool throughout the entire administration. Anyone who sees that colleagues from their own organisation have used AI to complete in a single morning a task for which they would otherwise have commissioned external specialists no longer needs abstract arguments. Even employees who have so far paid little attention to digital tools find a low-threshold entry point – and quickly achieve their own tangible successes.

The progress and impact report on the Soziale Stadt is not the end of the story, but its clearest chapter so far. In numerous other areas – from text editing to research to the preparation of decision papers – employees report noticeable relief in their day-to-day work. The one report that literally paid for the tool stands for a benefit that runs through the entire administration.

Press contact Tiger Landén | tiger.landen@intric.ai

About the City of Espelkamp 

The City Administration of Espelkamp is the municipality’s central organization for local governance. It supports the mayor and the elected municipal bodies, prepares and implements municipal decisions, and provides day-to-day public services to residents and local businesses across a wide range of administrative areas. Espelkamp has approximately 25,800 inhabitants.

About Intric 

Intric is a sovereign AI platform for government agencies and critical institutions. The platform enables organizations to operate AI assistants and AI agents on their own data, under their own governance, without dependence on external cloud infrastructure. Intric is developed in Sweden and is actively used at regulated institutions in the Nordic countries and Germany. The company was founded in 2021 and has its headquarters in Stockholm. Intric.ai