MIA — the AI Municipal Assistant Bijeljina and Laktaši Use for Civil-Registry and Business Queries

In October 2021, the cities of Bijeljina and Laktaši, in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Republika Srpska, became the first BiH municipalities to deploy MIA (Municipal Intelligent Assistant), an AI chatbot available on Viber, the cities' web portals and Facebook Messenger. It was introduced under a regional programme funded through Germany's develoPPP.de programme (GIZ, on behalf of BMZ) and implemented with software company SAGA, the Chamber of Commerce of Republika Srpska and business-network NGO NALED; the same programme separately deployed MIA in two Serbian municipalities, Šabac and Sombor.

MIA answers citizens' most common administrative questions — such as marriage-record registration, business/LLC registration procedures, and eligibility for student scholarships — plus general information like office hours and department contacts, available around the clock. According to GIZ, municipal staff across the pilot cities had been spending up to 2,400 hours a year answering these routine queries before the chatbot's introduction.

Independent reporting by NALED put combined usage across all four pilot municipalities (Bijeljina, Laktaši, Šabac and Sombor) at close to 80,000 registered users and more than 140,000 total conversations roughly a year after launch, with 298 utility-related reports and 181 vital-records/certificate requests filed through the chatbot channels in a three-month window after a 2022 software upgrade. These figures are reported at the level of the four-municipality programme rather than broken out for Bijeljina and Laktaši alone.

The City of Bijeljina's own communications described MIA as 'a new employee' of the city administration, reflecting its role in absorbing routine query volume, though city-specific usage in Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot be isolated from the published programme-level data.