Yokosuka City's ChatGPT Trial — Japan's First Municipal Rollout for Administrative Work

Yokosuka is a city in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, facing a shrinking, ageing population and a shrinking pool of public servants. In April 2023 it became the first Japanese municipality to open ChatGPT to virtually its entire workforce of about 4,000 employees for daily administrative work, covering tasks such as drafting welfare-bulletin copy, summarising documents, proofreading, and condensing meeting minutes.

The city aimed to test whether a general-purpose generative-AI tool could reduce the time employees spent on routine administrative writing and document tasks, at a time of workforce pressure from demographic decline. The trial specifically targeted everyday tasks such as drafting, summarising, proofreading, and condensing meeting minutes rather than a narrow, single-use case.

Yokosuka City Government ran a one-month trial in April 2023 in which ChatGPT was made available to nearly the entire municipal workforce (~4,000 employees) for their daily administrative work. Staff used the tool for drafting welfare-bulletin copy, summarising documents, proofreading, and condensing meeting minutes, and the city surveyed employees on their experience with the tool.

The city's own evaluation, reported by the Japan Times and Japan Today, found that ChatGPT cut working time by at least 10 minutes per employee per day when scaled across the workforce. However, about half of the surveyed staff said they were dissatisfied with the accuracy of ChatGPT's responses, underscoring the tool's unreliability for tasks requiring precision.

Despite the accuracy concerns raised by about half of surveyed staff, Yokosuka's government judged the net effect of the trial to be positive and formally adopted ChatGPT for administrative operations in June 2023. The trial became a widely cited reference case for other Japanese municipalities and prefectures that subsequently ran their own generative-AI trials.