The challenge
How do you make AI available to employees in the Public Sector, without risking data leaks? Halden Municipality in Norway has shown that it can be done. They came to Ayfie wanting to explore how AI could improve efficiency and everyday work across departments — without compromising privacy or security. Together with Ayfie, the municipality can offer an internal platform where all 2000 employees can experiment with and apply generative AI in daily tasks.
“We wanted an alternative that could safely be made available to everyone, without any risk that uploaded content, instructions or documents would leak,” says Øyvind Grandahl, Head of Digitalization, IT, Communication and Development at Halden Municipality.
The municipality’s IT and digitalization team, led by Øyvind Grandahl, set a clear goal: to build AI competence across the entire workforce and test how AI could support and improve public services.
The solution
To succeed, they needed both training for the entire staff, as well as pre-determined prompts together with Ayfie Business Agent. Today Ayfie is the internal platform where employees can use and swap between the most known language models in the market, upload documents and chat with their systems, without being afraid of security breaches.
Halden partnered with Ayfie and Frend Digital to deliver a municipality-wide AI training program and deploy Ayfie’s platform behind the municipal firewall.
- 250 employees completed introductory courses on generative AI and prompt design.
- 70 employees participated in workshops focused on building predefined instructions and AI agents supporting specific functions.
- 2,000 employees gained access to a secure, internal AI environment connected to Halden’s own data sources.
“Unlike consumer tools, Ayfie gives factual answers and shows the source of the information,” explains Hege Nikolaisen, COO at Ayfie. “This is not about buying more apps; it’s about unlocking the knowledge that’s already there and making it available in a ChatGPT like interface,” says Nikolaisen.
The result
Halden has already seen clear effects from its adoption of AI .
- Over 40,000 documents and 20,000 journal entries processed automatically through RPA.
- Two administrative positions reallocated due to improved efficiency.
- Broad employee engagement and early competence gains in practical AI use.
The next steps for advancing usage
The municipality is now preparing the next phase of its AI program with Ayfie’s Index. The Index is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution enabling employees to retrieve verified information directly from the municipality’s internal documents, procedures, and knowledge bases — regardless of format, server or type of software. This could help them with:
- Case processing: analyse incoming applications, check for required information, request missing details, and draft decision proposals based on municipal guidelines, criteria, laws and regulations — particularly within health, care, and NAV-related services.
- Management information: Identifying how Ayfie can retrieve and compile relevant data across finance and HR systems, giving leadership reliable insight and aggregated decision-support.
- Finance: Looking to automate daily, weekly, monthly or annual comparisons, reports, or forecasts to support planning and resource management.
- HR, intranet and documentation: Assessing how information from the intranet and the municipality’s procedure/routine library (Samsvar) can be combined into a unified AI-supported access point for employees.
