Who will answer your residents' questions in five years?

A family moves to a new town. In the past they would have checked the municipality's website or called the town hall. Today they ask their phone: When is our general waste collected? Do we need a permit for a carport? Where do we register our child for nursery?

The answer comes instantly and sounds confident. Whether it is right, nobody knows. The municipality was not part of that conversation.

The questions are moving elsewhere

More and more questions that used to land at the town hall or on the municipal website now go to AI assistants: on the phone, in the search engine, soon in the car and in the speaker in the living room. These assistants answer from what they find. That might be a PDF from three years ago, an old newspaper article or a forum post.

The municipality never hears about it. It does not know what is being said about it, and it cannot correct it. It is the same with visitors. Whoever asks what is on in the region tonight is recommended the offers that are easy to find. Everything else does not exist in the answer.

This shifts something fundamental. Until now the municipality was the first place for information about itself. In future, whoever has the best data decides.

The real problem: every municipality does it differently

Austria has more than 2,000 municipalities. All of them publish the same kind of information: dates, opening hours, fees, forms, contacts, events, waste collection plans, building rules. And each does it in its own way: as a PDF, on the website, in the local newsletter, on Facebook, on a notice board.

For a person that is tedious but manageable. For a machine it is barely readable. There is no shared structure, no shared terms and often not even a hint as to which version is current.

We see this every day. For our Müllkalender we read the waste collection plans of municipalities across Austria. Hardly two look alike: tables, calendars in PDFs, street lists, photographed sheets of paper. That is no criticism of the municipalities. Nobody ever asked them to write for machines. But now it matters.

The pressure comes from several sides

Knowledge is retiring. In many town halls, experienced people will retire in the coming years. Much of what they know is not written down anywhere: which street belongs to which collection district, which exception applies to what, who is responsible at which club.

Answers are expected around the clock. The question comes at ten on a Sunday evening, not during office hours.

There are more and more channels. Website, app, newsletter, local paper, social media, screens at the town hall, tourism portals. Each channel is maintained separately, and each copy goes out of date a little sooner than the others.

The region needs an overview. District, state and tourist board want to know what is offered where. Today that only works by asking each municipality one by one.

The answer is not a chatbot

It is tempting to put a chatbot on the municipal website. But a chatbot on disorganised data gives fluent, wrong answers. Another app does not help either. It is just one more channel to maintain.

What is needed is a foundation underneath:

• Each municipality's information is captured once in an orderly way: what, when, where, for whom, valid from when and from which source.
• It is maintained automatically from what already exists: website, PDFs, local newsletter, existing software. No extra work at the town hall. Changes are detected and checked.
• Every detail keeps its origin. The municipality remains the source, and nothing is made up.
• All municipalities follow the same structure. So a district, state or tourism region can see and use everything at once.

On this foundation everything else becomes simple. Website and app show the same thing. The newsletter almost writes itself. The screens at the town hall are current. And AI assistants can answer correctly, because they draw on checked information instead of guessing. We described how that works technically in "AI that checks instead of guessing".

What changes

For residents: correct answers at any time, in plain language and, if needed, in other languages, for example for people new to the country.

For the town hall: fewer routine calls. Knowledge stays, even when people leave. A change is entered once and is right everywhere.

For district, state and region: a real overview of which services exist where and where something is missing. As a basis for planning and funding, not gut feeling.

For tourism: visitors get local information that is correct, in their language and far beyond the well-known sights.

How we approach it

This foundation is exactly what we build. With a knowledge graph in which every municipality, every service, every place and every date appears exactly once and is linked to everything that belongs to it. With our own research when a detail is missing or unclear. And with answers that always rest on a source.

You do not have to start with a big project. There are two good ways in. Either one type of information for many municipalities, for example all events or all collection dates in a district. Or all the information of one municipality as a model for the others. From there it grows.

You are a municipality, an association of municipalities, a state or a tourist board and want the answers about you to be right? Write to us. We are happy to show you what this could look like for your region.

Arthur Pichl, Co-founder, SUPERFREY FlexCo. Vienna, September 2026.