How does
City of Buenos Aires
Use AI?
Handles 3 million monthly conversations with 90% satisfaction and 80% automation rate.
Project Overview
AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot providing Buenos Aires citizens with government information, services, and COVID-19 support
Layman's Explanation
Boti is Buenos Aires' digital government assistant that lives on WhatsApp, helping citizens navigate bureaucracy without waiting in lines or making phone calls. Citizens can ask Boti about everything from renewing driver's licenses to finding vaccination appointments, and it responds in the local Argentine Spanish dialect that residents actually speak. The system connects to over 70 government databases and services, making it a one-stop shop for city information that's available 24/7 on the messaging app most Argentines already use daily.
Details
Launched in February 2019 on WhatsApp, Boti has evolved into Buenos Aires' primary digital government interface, processing up to 11 million conversations monthly during COVID-19 peaks. The system leverages Amazon Bedrock and LangGraph in partnership with AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, featuring sophisticated architecture with an Input Guardrail System that blocks 100% of harmful queries and a Government Procedures Agent that delivers contextually appropriate responses.
The platform's technical innovation centers on its "reasoning retriever" that achieves 98.9% accuracy in matching citizen queries to correct government procedures, representing a 12.5-17.5% improvement over standard RAG methods. Boti is specifically trained in Rioplatense Spanish dialect, including voseo usage (98% accuracy) and periphrastic future tense (92% accuracy), making interactions feel natural for local residents.
Integration spans over 70 government and external systems through Buenos Aires' X-Road data exchange layer and QuarkID decentralized identity system. The platform supports the city's broader 16-year digital transformation initiative, connecting citizens to services ranging from healthcare appointments to cultural events, while maintaining high availability architecture that seamlessly escalates complex queries to 250+ human operators across 15 specialized service queues when needed.
Analogy
Think of Boti as having a knowledgeable local friend who works at City Hall and never sleeps. Just like you'd text a friend to ask "Hey, where do I renew my license?" or "What's happening this weekend?", citizens text Boti their government questions. But unlike your friend who might say "I think it's downtown somewhere," Boti instantly knows exactly which office, what documents you need, current wait times, and can even help you start the process, all while chatting in the same casual Buenos Aires Spanish you'd use with your neighbor.
Machine Learning Techniques Used
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Novelty Justification
Boti demonstrates high novelty through its sophisticated reasoning retriever that significantly outperforms standard RAG methods, deep integration with over 70 government databases via X-Road and QuarkID, and precise localization in Rioplatense Spanish dialect, which is rare among governments. But, while it uses state-of-the-art generative AI and multi-agent workflows, the core technologies (Amazon Bedrock, LangGraph) are commercially available, placing it below the frontier of groundbreaking ML research.
Project Estimates
