AI-based chatbot

Client: Salamanca City council
Date: Spain
Technologies used / Software vendors: Liferay DXP

Challenge
Solution
Benefits

Challenge

In 2015, the Salamanca City Council, aware of the need to modernize its administration and bring it closer to citizens, launched an ambitious digital transformation strategy. To materialize its vision of a more accessible and participatory administration, it became clear that the city’s residents and business community needed easier access to administrative and tax-related procedures. This required a centralized, transparent, and open platform capable of responding to their needs 24/7, aligned with the habits and expectations of an increasingly digital society.

The main challenge was to modernize its digital interaction model to deliver a more accessible, simple, agile, and always-available administration. This involved transforming its web presence and developing a comprehensive public service platform that met usability, engagement, and empowerment requirements for citizens, businesses, and public employees. The goal was to centralize municipal information, foster citizen and business participation, and enhance public service delivery through technological innovation—including AI. Ensuring universal accessibility and a consistent user experience across multiple devices was also critical.

On a technical level, the City Council faced a fragmented digital ecosystem with scattered information and an inconsistent user experience. It was necessary to improve interaction and personalization, coherently consolidating the vast amount of citizen-related information and ensuring that services and content were available across different devices, regardless of the access channel.

On a cultural and operational level, the institution pursued a profound paradigm shift. Empowering internal teams for autonomous and agile content management—eliminating the need for specialized technical knowledge—was essential. This empowerment would enable intelligent and proactive citizen service capable of anticipating needs and delivering personalized responses, moving beyond a reactive and bureaucratic model.

Solution

To address these challenges, the Salamanca City Council undertook a highly complex and ambitious project focused on building a new digital ecosystem. The core solution was conceived as a global public service platform, and selecting Liferay DXP as the technological foundation—implemented by its partner Ayesa Digital—was a strategic decision.

The City Council required a robust, scalable, and flexible solution deployed in the cloud under a PaaS (Platform as a Service) model, ensuring maximum performance, availability, scalability, and security, while enabling continuous evolution. Liferay DXP fulfilled key needs such as functional scalability, a modular architecture that supports evolution, reuse of common components to optimize cost and quality, high availability, flexibility to accommodate municipal activity, and decoupled portals to ensure service continuity.

Implementation was structured around the “Salamanca Technological and Functional Core,” the underlying technical and functional base that supports and powers all portals and subsites within the new web ecosystem. This core integrates the transversal and common capabilities required for a state-of-the-art digital experience. Out-of-the-box Liferay capabilities—such as portal management, content management, advanced document management, advanced semantic search (powered by Elastic Search), and a multichannel AI-driven conversational chatbot—were fundamental.

Liferay also facilitated the creation of compelling digital experiences and content by non-technical users, the integration of AI into the user experience and content management, and enterprise-grade capabilities such as forms, surveys, and workflows—without requiring IT development. Integration capabilities with other municipal, regional, or national systems were also considered, as well as tools to support migration from existing portals.

Ayesa Digital, a Liferay Platinum Partner, led the development effort, leveraging Liferay’s capabilities to build a modern, attractive, citizen-centric ecosystem structured around the following pillars:

New omnichannel digital experience: A modern, device-optimized, accessible user experience was designed. Based on User-Centered Design and agile methodology, the platform ensures a consistent experience across computers, tablets, and mobile devices. It recognizes users’ previous browsing history and supports seamless transitions between devices, with real-time synchronization of notifications and recommendations.
Easy, intuitive, proactive, and intelligent access to information: The system optimizes the relationship between the City Council and citizens by providing access to relevant information without navigating multiple sections. The information architecture is theme-based and citizen-centric; combined with advanced search functionalities (custom Elastic Search algorithms and semantic capabilities), it enables immediate responses to complex queries. The incorporation of Artificial Intelligence into both the search engine and the chatbot ensures precise and specific results, with continuous learning to improve performance.
Semantic Chatbot for personalized, intelligent support (Vega): To enhance interaction, a semantic chatbot named Vega was deployed, powered by artificial intelligence. Vega understands natural language and provides real-time, precise responses to website content, resolving queries instantly and continuously. User interactions serve as ongoing training to improve its accuracy, thoroughness, and recommendation quality, reducing operational support and citizen service costs.

In addition, strategic citizen-oriented service lines were developed on this foundation:

Salamanca Communicates: This became the central hub of the digital communication strategy, consolidating all municipal activity. It supports agile content creation and empowers City Council staff to build web experiences and publish content without IT expertise. It integrates functionalities such as a Press Room, Video Library, newsletter, advanced notifications, and social media spaces—all within a comprehensive digital marketing strategy covering planning, creation, editing, layout, dissemination, SEO, and content marketing.
Salamanca Open: The new digital experience introduced dedicated spaces for Open Government and citizen participation. It encourages citizen empowerment and involvement in decision-making through digital channels, including a Transparency Portal and an Open Government and Participation Space. It promotes interaction through surveys, forums, and community activities, strengthening the bond between the administration and the community.
Salamanca Works: This line embodies the City Council’s service orientation, offering a centralized set of digital procedures, products, and services. Liferay’s capabilities enabled the deployment of a citizen service area, municipal service directories, an electronic procedures hub, and interaction and feedback tools (inquiry forms, complaints, suggestions, incident reports, etc.), along with citizen surveys and questionnaires. To reinforce this service orientation, key features were integrated, such as personalized information and intelligent segmentation, analyzing user behavior to provide real-time, interest-based content and recommendations.

Benefits

The implementation of the Salamanca City Council’s new web ecosystem has transformed its digital relationship with citizens, businesses, and public employees, achieving significant impact on efficiency and user satisfaction:

Exponential growth in visits and users: In roughly one year, web ecosystem visits quadrupled from 500,000 to 2 million annually. New users doubled, reaching 300,000 unique individuals.
Mobile optimization: Mobile access increased from 45% to over 60%, demonstrating the effectiveness of responsive design and the demand for mobile services.
Greater transparency and information access: The creation of areas such as the Transparency Portal and the Open Data Portal improved information availability for citizens and businesses.
Agile, relevant digital services: Procedures such as downloading the residence certificate are now completed in three clicks. The business and entrepreneurship portal was redesigned, offering tools and spaces for coworking and training.
Impact of AI (Vega): The Vega chatbot managed around 21,000 conversations in one year, reaching an interaction volume equivalent to 50% of the 010 telephone service—solidifying its role as a major citizen service channel.
Digital engagement with businesses: The City Council achieved 25% electronic processing of administrative activity with legal entities, amounting to over 22,000 electronic records in the past year. Although most services target citizens—hence 75% of procedures involving natural persons—this level of business digitalization reflects the success of the entire ecosystem. For a city of 146,000 inhabitants, this represents a decisive step toward a more efficient, modern, and accessible administration.
Future vision: The project lays the foundation for a smart city plan focused on converting data into public value, implementing data analytics systems, IoT technology for efficient urban management, and predictive and simulation-based AI strategies to optimize service delivery.

The new web ecosystem of the Salamanca City Council, powered by Ayesa Digital and Liferay DXP, has emerged as a modern, attractive, multichannel, personalized, intelligent, and citizen-centric platform—marking a milestone in its digital transformation strategy.