City of Sydney's GenAI Internal Knowledge Chatbot

The City of Sydney Council hosts 231k residents, 600k daily workers and visitors, and employs about 2k staff, united by a vision of a “Green, Global and Connected” city.

Within the Technology & Digital Services function, the cross‑disciplinary Digital Innovation Team is tasked to “make every digital interaction with the City exceptional”. The team pairs human‑centred design with lean engineering to pilot emerging tech quickly, prove value with data, and then scale responsibly.

In late 2023 the City issued Responsible Generative‑AI Guidelines, giving staff clear guard‑rails for safe experimentation. The Innovation Team ran ideation workshops across business units to surface low‑risk, high‑impact use cases; the most acute pain‑point was staff wasting minutes hunting policy details buried in more than 700 PDFs on the City of Sydney's intranet.

The response was the City of Sydney's Internal Knowledge Chatbot. Built entirely inside the Microsoft stack and delivered in just six weeks, the chatbot lets employees ask natural‑language questions like “How much petty cash can I claim?” and returns the exact paragraph with a source link. By grounding each answer in official City knowledge, the chatbot keeps information secure and accurate. By demonstrating rapid value creation in harnessing generative AI, the project has acted as an on-ramp for Council executives, persuading them to become open to experiment with wider GenAI initiatives due to the proven productivity and satisfaction uplift.

First piloted with 36 employees, the chatbot is reshaping how a risk‑averse government workforce accesses knowledge, learns AI skills and imagines future automation.