Residents reach the city at any hour, across hundreds of topics
OuluBot is the City of Oulu’s AI agent. It serves residents around the clock, from public transport and travel cards to library services and building control.
Public sector · Finland · Customer Service Automation
90%+
Of incoming service contacts served by AI agents
80%
Of all questions successfully resolved
50 000+
Resident contacts a year
The Oulu 10 service point alone takes 7,000 to 8,000 contacts a month
The City of Oulu’s customer service unit serves through customer visits, by telephone, e-mail, through social media channels, on live chat and via OuluBot.
There is no exact aggregate figure across all city customer services. At the Oulu 10 centralised service point alone there are already on average 7,000 to 8,000 contacts per month.
| Organisation | City of Oulu |
| Serving residents since | 2020 |
| Procurement route | Innovation Partnership, Business Finland |
Ideas outran the products the market could sell
People-oriented services are a key priority for the city. Feedback and ideas have been gathered from local residents through mystery shoppers, surveys and development projects.
For a customer service unit this size there is no shortage of development ideas. For many of them no ready-made implementation solution exists on the market, and it is hard to write a specification for something people have not seen.
Topics run from travel cards to building control
OuluBot is the City of Oulu’s AI agent. It serves residents around the clock across hundreds of topics, ranging from public transport and travel cards to library services and building control.
Integrations include the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue and the My Oulu event calendar. Using location data, OuluBot provides location-targeted information about events near the user. It is built to work across devices, from mobile phones to smart TVs.
More than 50 city employees learned to teach the bot
Head start
300,000 past chat messages were clustered to form about half of the AI training data, the first discussion analysis of its kind in Finnish.
Sprints
The build ran as ten two-month sprint periods. Many of the solutions created in the sprints are already in use by city residents.
Enablement
37 people completed content producer training and 29 were trained as bot whisperers. An open support session runs for an hour every week and is recorded.
Eight in ten questions now finish without a person
Nine in ten contacts meet an AI agent first
Over 90% of incoming service contacts are served by AI agents, so customer service representatives can focus on the most complex cases.
More than 50,000 contacts a year
Volumes grew from hundreds of discussions a month at launch in 2020 as OuluBot reached new webpages across the city.
Every resident gets the same answer
Once the bot has learned a subdivision, the same depth of knowledge reaches every resident and no longer depends on which employee is on hand.
Other cities can take the same procurement route
The procurement route matters as much as the technology. Oulu bought OuluBot as an Innovation Partnership, a Business Finland route in which the buyer does not specify a finished product up front and the solution is built jointly during the project. For buyers who cannot write a specification for something people have not seen, that route is often the only way the project happens.
TECHNOLOGY AND PARTNERS
