Vienna’s WienKI project has been honored with the European Commission’s Public Sector Tech Watch Best Cases Award at the SEMIC 2025 Conference in Copenhagen.
The city received the Government-to-Government distinction for its secure, transparent and user-focused approach to integrating Artificial Intelligence into municipal administration.
City Councillor for Digitalization Barbara Novak said the recognition validates Vienna’s strategy noting that WienKI demonstrates how modern technologies can operate alongside strict data-protection standards. She said the system is helping make public administration faster, more modern and more inclusive while safeguarding municipal control over data.
Vienna officials presented the project to international experts at SEMIC, an EU initiative promoting semantic interoperability across European e-government systems.
Accepting the award, City Councillor Aslihan Bozatemur-Akdağ said the acknowledgment highlights the work of MA01 and strengthens cooperation with European partners on digital sovereignty.
Developed by Wien Digital (MA 01) with multiple city departments, WienKI relies on a hybrid enterprise architecture designed for high data security, flexibility and scalability.
The platform offers employees regulated access to Generative AI tools compliant with the EU AI Act, GDPR and EU Data Protection Act. Key functions include multilingual AI assistance, semantic search, automatic anonymisation, generative search across internal data sources and extensive accessibility features.
Usage continues to rise with more than 2,500 active users, 70,000 activated accounts, 104,000 chats, 292 million processed tokens, 14,000 knowledge-database documents and 1,600 community members.
City officials attribute WienKI’s success to strong governance, continuous staff training and a modular architecture that supports interoperability, secure data storage and future expansion across Europe.
