INPS's AI-Rewritten Plain-Language Content — Italy's Social Security Institute Matches Expert Writers in a 1,600-User Blind Test

INPS, Italy's national social security institute, serves roughly 45 million residents, receives about 800 million site visits a year and offers over 450 services across more than 2,500 forms and applications.

In April 2024 INPS issued its first official directive on AI use, followed by a 2024–2026 AI development plan. As part of that plan, INPS used generative AI to rewrite institutional web content — replacing dense administrative Italian with clearer, more direct language.

The process pairs AI-generated drafts with human review for semantic accuracy before publication, applied across more than 2,100 pages and text items to date. To test quality, INPS and researchers ran a blind comparison with roughly 1,600 members of the public: participants were shown original text alongside both an expert-simplified version and an AI-simplified version, without being told which was which.

Expert versions were preferred in just over 70% of cases, and the AI versions achieved essentially the same ~70% preference rate, with some users describing the AI output as clearer and more scannable than the human original. By INPS's 2026 annual report, 59 distinct AI systems were in operation across the institute, together handling about 80% of incoming service requests and 87% of certified email (PEC) traffic.

Independent Italian press and a workers' union bulletin corroborate the rollout, though none names the specific underlying AI model or publishes an error-rate/hallucination audit for the rewriting tool.