MIA — Serbia's Municipal AI Assistant for Citizen Services in Sombor and Šabac

In October 2021, the German development agency GIZ — through the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development's develoPPP programme — partnered with the Serbian business alliance NALED and technology company SAGA to launch MIA (Municipal Intelligent Assistant), an AI chatbot answering citizens' questions about civil-registry certificates, tax certificates, and parental/child benefit procedures. The chatbot went live simultaneously in two Serbian cities, Sombor and Šabac, and two Bosnian municipalities, Bijeljina and Laktaši, reachable through Viber, Facebook Messenger and each city's web portal.

NALED, which coordinated the roll-out, reported that within a little over a year of operation MIA had registered close to 80,000 users across the four pilot municipalities and logged more than 140,000 conversations. Ahead of the launch, NALED had estimated that municipal staff in the pilot cities were together spending up to 2,400 hours a year answering the same routine queries the chatbot was built to handle.

The programme was explicitly designed for replication: from the outset it ran concurrently in two countries and four municipalities under one shared technical platform and governance structure (GIZ, NALED, SAGA and the Chamber of Commerce of Republika Srpska), with organisers stating that positive results were meant to inform wider rollout elsewhere in the region.

Note: this catalogue separately documents the Bosnian half of the same programme (Bijeljina and Laktaši); this entry focuses on the Serbian deployment (Sombor and Šabac), and the usage figures above are combined totals across all four municipalities as reported by NALED, since city-level breakdowns were not published separately.

Read the full analysis: https://naled.rs/projekti-mia-chatbot-za-opstinske-usluge-5531