Project Overview

The City of Sydney Intranet AI Search Bot is an AI-powered solution that enables City of Sydney employees to find internal information quickly using natural language. Built entirely within the Microsoft ecosystem for quick deployment and strong security, it surfaces hard-to-find content from dense documents, improving productivity, reducing search time, and enhancing the employee experience through intuitive access.

City of Sydney's intranet portal (CityNet) holds extensive internal documentation, often lengthy and complex. Our innovative solution harnesses AI to help employees rapidly and naturally find precise information. They can now ask everyday questions and receive instant, clear answers directly from CityNet’s content, significantly reducing search times and clarifying policies and procedures. Staff no longer need to chase colleagues or guess—information is easily accessible whenever needed.
Along with these benefits, the project also delivered additional unexpected benefits: it boosted AI literacy organisation-wide and uncovered new opportunities for automation and content enhancement.

By making information retrieval quick, intuitive, and reliable, the Intranet AI Search Bot is fundamentally changing staff interaction with information and setting a robust foundation for future AI innovations at the City.

Organisation

City of Sydney

Team

Mark Mitchell - Digital Innovation Service Designer
Michaela Upton - Digital Innovation Program Manager
Ying Fan - Senior Software Engineer
Dr Tom Gao - Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer

Project Brief

In 2024, the City of Sydney released internal Guidelines promoting safe and responsible use of Generative AI. Recognising the need to experiment responsibly with this emerging tech to understand the benefits it can bring to our organisation and community, the Digital Innovation Team conducted workshops with various staff to identify practical, low-risk AI opportunities. Prioritising these based on impact, effort, and risk, we selected the key issue of staff struggling to efficiently access information on our intranet, CityNet.

We learnt that navigating dense internal documentation had become a significant challenge for City of Sydney employees, negatively impacting productivity. We decided to prototype an AI search bot that could address this issue, which could ingest our dense policy and strategy documents that number over 700 and enable employees to quickly receive concise, accurate responses without the frustration of combing through these lengthy documents (especially if they don't know what they're looking for).

Through user-centred design and rigorous pilot testing, the bot quickly demonstrated tangible value, becoming indispensable. Staff feedback consistently praised its accuracy, speed, and ease of use, with more than one participant describing it as a "game changer."

Beyond technology, this project marks an organisational shift toward innovation, agility, and proactive experimentation within a traditionally cautious public sector organisation. By seamlessly integrating powerful AI into everyday workflows, we are significantly improving employee satisfaction and efficiency, and setting a benchmark for future digital transformations.

Project Innovation/Need

Recognising the need for responsible AI experimentation to understand what benefits the technology can bring to the organisation and our community, we chose to develop the Intranet AI Search Bot to gain rapid learning on the technology while solving for an identified employee need (navigating dense internal documentation is a significant challenge for employees and negatively impacts productivity). The project represented an ideal balance of high potential value and minimal risk.

We designed the pilot to integrate seamlessly with existing processes and data structures, requiring minimal business procedure changes to what already exists. This allowed us to move fast and deliver rapid benefits while minimising any disruption, avoiding procedural bottlenecks that are common in large public-sector organisations.

Our rapid deployment and lean test-and-learn approach allowed immediate user engagement and made iterative improvements possible, which was another goal of the project -- helping the organisation adapt to agile product development to keep pace with rapid technological change.

Design Challenge

The main challenge was overcoming organisational scepticism and risk aversion towards AI. Many senior stakeholders view AI as a high-risk technology, or merely a fad, requiring a carefully structured approach to the project to build trust and prove multiple facets of value: usability, productivity gains, and ease-of-deployment.

An iterative, user-centred pilot involving 36 staff across the organisation helped address these concerns directly. Direct references to source material were critical to its success and built confidence around accuracy and misinformation concerns. We carefully crafted the bot's system prompt, embedding organisational context and tweaking its behaviour to address additional needs from our employees that we uncovered during the test pilot phase. Staff feedback consistently praised its accuracy, speed, ease of use and user-friendly interface, with two separate participants describing it as a "game changer."

Our responsive incorporation of user feedback transformed initial scepticism into enthusiastic adoption across levels of the organisation, and our rapid-pilot approach effectively demonstrated genuine value and practical benefits of generative AI, accelerating organisational buy-in and paving the way for future innovations.

Future Impact

The Intranet AI Search Bot quickly demonstrated significant value, laying the groundwork for impactful, community-facing generative AI applications. By building internal trust through proven practical outcomes, the City of Sydney is now poised to confidently explore innovative external AI projects.

Future initiatives include enhancing the City’s main public website with an AI chatbot, dramatically simplifying navigation and access to relevant information for our 10k daily active website visitors. Additionally, integrating AI into our "What's On" event platform will enable personalised event recommendations, deepening community engagement with the City.

By responsibly validating AI technology internally, the City has effectively demystified it, empowering stakeholders to support ambitious, future-focused community innovations. This proactive approach positions the City of Sydney as a forward-thinking leader, harnessing generative AI to drive meaningful improvements for employees and the broader community.