Mai (Montferland AI)

Municipality of Montferland

Mai is a chatbot that answers general questions from citizens 24/7 on the municipality of Montferland's website. The chatbot replaces the current live chat to reduce waiting times and provide instant answers.

Last change on 2nd of December 2024, at 11:21 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: DPIA
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Organisation and business operations

Begin date

2024-2

Contact information

[e-mail]

Link to publication website

https://www.montferland.info/gebruiksvoorwaarden-en-privacy-chatbot-mai

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The aim of Mai is to provide citizens with faster, 24/7 answers to their general questions. This relieves staff on livechat, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks requiring human intervention. The impact is improved service delivery and more efficient use of municipal resources.

Considerations

In developing Mai, the following considerations were made:

- Quality of answers compared to human assistants

- Correctness and accuracy of information given

- Ability to stay within the topic

- Compliance with municipal core values

- Privacy, security and transparency

A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) was carried out and a penetration test by an external party to ensure security.

Human intervention

In principle, Mai functions independently without direct human intervention. However, the chatbot's responses are closely monitored by municipality employees. Feedback from citizens after each chat conversation is used to continuously improve the system.

Risk management

To manage risks, the following measures have been taken:

• Implementation of a DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment)
• External penetration test for security validation
• Constant monitoring of chatbot performance
• Ability to take immediate action if necessary
• Continuous improvement of quality and security based on feedback and performance analysis

Legal basis

Providing reliable government information on products and services of Montferland Municipality.

Impact assessment

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA): https://www.montferland.info/sites/default/files/2024-12/DPIA%20Chatbot%202.0%20-%20geanonimiseerd.pdf

Operations

Data

Mai uses the following data sources:

• Information from the municipal website
• The General Local Bye-Law (APV)
• Additional documents containing municipal information

Technical design

Mai is based on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system and uses the following components:

• Platform: Flowise (open-source, on-premises hosted)
• Vector Database: Qdrant (open-source, on-premises hosted)
• Large Language Model (LLM) and Embedding: Azure OpenAI deployments (proprietary instance)

This system enables Mai to retrieve relevant information from available sources and combine it with the capabilities of the language model to generate accurate and context-relevant answers.

External provider

Developed internally by Montferland Municipality led by Daniel Verloop (AI Specialist)