From endless searching to a clear conversation: the VNG's AI journey

Picture this: you work for a municipality and you urgently need information about a specific policy topic. You land on the VNG website, type in your search term and get seven pages of results. You click, read, summarize and filter. By the time you have the answer, your valuable time has evaporated.

This was the reality the VNG wanted to change. After all, the association exists to strengthen municipalities by pooling their interests and offering practical support. That is the heart of its reason to exist: making sure local government can carry out its public tasks as well as possible. A website that hides information rather than opening it up stands directly in the way of that goal.

The urgency of the new tech landscape

Technological developments follow one another at a furious pace. The market is flooded with new chatbots, generative AI tools and innovative software. For many organizations it feels like a maze of choices. Sitting still isn't an option though; today's tech landscape demands that organizations at least learn how to use this technology responsibly.

Remy, project lead at the VNG, saw this wave heading for the organization. "Technology moves faster than we can keep up with sometimes," Remy says. "If you don't move with it as a supporting organization, you fall behind. We don't have to be the absolute front-runner, but we do have to understand what strengths we can put to work for our members."

Hands-on learning: the role of vragen.ai

Rather than talk about AI in theory, the VNG looked for a way to really get their hands dirty. That is where working with vragen.ai came in. For the VNG this wasn't a matter of simply buying a product. It was a deliberate decision to learn by doing.

By deploying vragen.ai as an experimental layer on top of the website, the team could see for themselves what happens in practice when an AI model gets to work with municipal data. It helped the VNG get answers to crucial questions fast:

• How does a language model respond to complex legal texts?

• What happens when the source information is fragmented?

• And what does it feel like for a user to hold a dialogue instead of typing in a search term?

• What else do you run into when you start with AI, and how does your own organization respond to that?

"Working with the experts gave us the safe space we needed to simply get on with it," Remy explains. "No endless reports up front, but testing and adjusting straight away. That is the only way to really build AI literacy inside your organization."

Ethics and open source: the wider view

Although the pilot with vragen.ai delivered valuable insight, the VNG stays alert to its independent role. As a public association it is essential not to become dependent on a single supplier.

How do you safeguard trust and quality?

There were of course concerns beforehand about hallucinations or overly confident answers. By keeping the experiment small and involving in-house experts (lawyers and spokespeople, for instance) from the start, that fear turned into a sense of control. In practice the answers turned out to be surprisingly strong.

Today, monitoring is a fixed part of the work. Editors and the contact center review it weekly:

• Are the answers factually correct?

• Is the data the AI retrieves up to date?

• Why does the AI give a different answer than a colleague would?

Looking ahead: the web is becoming conversational

The pilot has shown that the traditional website, where you have to dig through menus yourself, is changing. We are moving toward a conversation-led web. Systems understand context and give answers instead of just a list of links.

For the VNG this is only the beginning. Putting AI on your website lifts both efficiency and user experience. Smart automation helps visitors faster, content stays current and relevant, and processes such as search and customer service improve considerably. It makes your site smarter, more personal, and better at doing what you built it for.

Do you work for a municipality?

Working at a municipality and thinking this over? The page for municipalities has the whole story: what it delivers for residents, what the law asks of you around accessibility and the AI Act, and who is responsible for what if you want to propose this internally.