Asker kommune provides 24/7 support to over 6,500 employees with conversational AI

Last updated 29 February 2024

Asker kommune is a Norwegian municipality located to the south west of Oslo that merged with the Hurum and Røyken districts in 2020. Home to more than 90,000 inhabitants and over 6,500 public sector employees, the municipality was searching for a digital solution to help ease the transition by providing a central repository of information for its employees that was both easy to access and use.

This took the form of a unique implementation of boost.ai’s multi-city conversational AI platform, Kommune-Kari. Already live in over 90 municipalities in Norway, and developed in partnership with Sem & Stenersen Prokom, Kommune-Kari uses boost.ai’s market-leading Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to make it possible for local governments to build and deploy an AI-powered virtual agent that draws from a knowledge base of over 6,000 public-sector-related topics and answers. This virtual agent can easily be tailored to each municipality by its own employees via a no-code interface requiring zero technical expertise.

In the case of Asker kommune, it was quickly identified that employees were asking the citizen-facing Kommune-Kari bot questions related to the merger and other work-related topics. As these fell outside of the virtual agent’s intended scope, boost.ai and Sem & Stenersen Prokom rebranded the platform as Tore på kontoret (or ‘Tore at the office’, in English) and trained it to answer questions specific to internal employee support.

Built on the same common framework as Kommune-Kari, Tore was designed to assist in the following ways:

  • Present answers in a clear and consistent manner that employees can understand
  • Make better use of existing information sources within a given municipality
  • Provide a common framework of answers to be shared between municipalities

The scope of Tore’s knowledge ranges from common IT and HR questions to reporting, organizational queries and general support services. With a knowledge base of over 2,600 topics, municipality employees are able to chat with Tore 24/7 and find the answers they need both inside and outside contact center opening hours.

“The gains from having a digital colleague like Tore is that he is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A lot of the municipality workforce don’t have an office, so they can ask Tore any questions any time from their smartphones.”

- Hanne Huseby Aune, Project Manager, Asker kommune

The municipality formed a project group to train and maintain Tore. They meet often to review chat logs and the answer database, using conversation data and analytics from the boost.ai platform to improve the virtual agent’s knowledge over time.

This hands-on approach to internal support automation has led to high-levels of employee satisfaction with Tore på kontoret. Through the virtual agent’s built-in feedback system, employees have consistently given Tore positive scores for more than 42 consecutive weeks demonstrating that an always-available digital colleague is a net-positive to the municipality and its employee base.