Buenos Aires Boti GenAI Chatbot (WhatsApp Citizen Services with Azure OpenAI)

Overview

The Government of the City of Buenos Aires (Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, GCBA), through its Secretariat of Innovation and Digital Transformation, operates Boti, a WhatsApp-based chatbot that serves as the primary digital interface between the municipal government and its residents. Launched in February 2019, Buenos Aires became the among the first governments to use WhatsApp as an official citizen communication channel. Boti was originally built on the Botmaker platform with natural language processing capabilities and has since been upgraded with Microsoft Azure OpenAI generative AI services, integrating GPT-4o and a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to enable natural-language, personalised interactions at scale.

Boti handles approximately 2 million queries per month without human intervention, covering more than 450 topics through over 70 integrations with government systems and 15 human service queues staffed by more than 250 operators for cases requiring human escalation. By 2022, the chatbot had exceeded 26 million cumulative conversations, and by the time of its generative AI upgrade in mid-2024 it had accumulated over 153 million total interactions since launch. Botmaker, the Argentine technology company that built the original platform, reported that 82 percent of all queries are resolved by the chatbot without human intervention, with only 18 percent referred to human agents.

The generative AI upgrade, announced in August 2024 and developed in partnership with Microsoft and the consulting firm Pi Data Strategy, incorporated GPT-4o through Azure OpenAI Services. The system uses a RAG pattern — described by Microsoft News Centre as the 'patrón de Generación Aumentada por Recuperación' — as the foundational element of its grounding strategy, ensuring that responses are anchored in verified government data rather than uncontrolled model outputs. The RAG architecture retrieves information from a centralised government content repository and combines it with GPT-4o's language generation capabilities to produce contextualised, conversational responses. The system includes content filtering and Azure OpenAI monitoring for quality assurance. The initial GenAI deployment focused on tourism as a lower-risk domain to test personalisation capabilities without compromising sensitive data, with the chatbot generating personalised itineraries and recommendations based on official City Tourism Board (Ente de Turismo de la Ciudad) data. The system operates in both Spanish (using the Argentine 'voseo' dialect from the River Plate region, with inclusive language and emoji use) and English to serve international visitors.

Beyond tourism, Boti provides a wide range of city services spanning public health, social protection, administrative procedures, and urban management. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Boti became a critical public health infrastructure tool, providing symptom consultation, monitoring mild cases, scheduling vaccination appointments (facilitating over 11 million vaccination appointments during the campaign), delivering test results, and issuing health certificates. The system's peak demand during the pandemic significantly exceeded WhatsApp's platform constraint of 200 messages per second, reaching over 400 messages per second for COVID-19 test result delivery, which required the deployment of overflow channels on Facebook Messenger and web platforms. Monthly conversation volumes peaked at 11 million in January 2022, compared to a pre-pandemic baseline of approximately 200,000 monthly conversations.

In the social protection domain, Boti was integrated in April 2022 as a channel for social assistance services directed at vulnerable populations, developed collaboratively by the Secretariat of Innovation and Digital Transformation, the Subsecretariat of Citizen Services, and the General Directorate of Community Outreach under the Ministry of Human Development and Habitat (Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano y Hábitat). Through this integration, citizens can request comprehensive assistance for individuals experiencing homelessness, obtain information about ministerial social programmes and Social Inclusion Centres (Centros de Inclusión Social), submit housing subsidy receipts (Subsidy 690), and inquire about payment dates for specific benefit programmes. The chatbot also provides information on disability rights and inclusion, childhood and adolescence protection, family assistance programmes, gender violence support services, addiction care, and elderly care. For social service queries, users can escalate to live operators to resolve questions related to social programmes. Previously, these consultations were only available at in-person Social Care offices (formerly Zonal offices) under the Secretariat of Social Inclusion and Immediate Care.

Additional services include driver's licence renewal and issuance, national identity document appointments, public transport schedules, real-time parking availability, vehicle violation reports with image recognition, recycling guidance, abandoned vehicle removal requests, pothole and infrastructure repair reporting, and access to emergency helplines (lines 144 for gender violence, 102 for children and adolescents, and 108 for social emergencies). Boti also features innovative engagement content including interactive children's stories ('Boticuentos'), tongue twisters, jokes, and digital sticker downloads.

The GCBA reports that Boti's generative AI integration has reduced the operational burden on municipal teams by approximately 50 percent and improved citizen satisfaction, with a 90 percent average monthly satisfaction rate. The system maintains near-100 percent monthly service availability. The development team comprises UX designers, software developers, data science specialists, journalists and communicators, and quality assurance testers, operating under Scrum and Kanban agile methodologies. The chatbot employs a service bus architecture enabling interoperability and traceability across government systems, with georeferencing capabilities using APIs such as parking rule maps for location-specific data.

Key government officials overseeing the initiative include Diego Fernández, Secretary of Innovation and Digital Transformation; Pedro Alessandri, Undersecretary of Smart City; Julieta Rappan, General Director of Digital Channels; and Macarena Blasi, Chief of Staff. Fernando López Iervasi, President of Microsoft for Hispanic South America, has been quoted stating that generative AI 'brings us the opportunity to resolve needs immediately using language learned since childhood.' Due to its success, the City of Buenos Aires was selected to provide professional support to other Iberoamerican cities and has begun training three regional governments in chatbot design and implementation through the Public and Civic Innovation Program (PIIP) developed by SEGIB.

From a data governance perspective, Boti operates within strict local and international regulatory frameworks, leveraging Azure's native security capabilities. The system implements human-in-the-loop processes for oversight and to correct model outputs. However, an independent study by Derechos Digitales (2024) examined the chatbot's NLP and data handling practices, and no independent privacy audit of the GenAI components has been publicly documented. The Auditoría General de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (AGCBA) has also conducted an audit of the Boti system. Future development plans include voice assistant integration, SEO optimisation, automatic learning from user interactions, and expansion of GenAI capabilities beyond tourism to additional government service domains.

Classification

Programme Details

Multi-service municipal chatbot operated by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires providing citizen access to social assistance programmes, public health services, administrative procedures, and urban services through WhatsApp, with generative AI capabilities powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o with RAG).

Implementation Details

Risk & Oversight

Deployment & Outcomes

Sources

1. SRC-004-ARG-001 Botmaker (n.d.) 'Boti, the bot of the City of Buenos Aires', Botmaker Client Case Study. Available at: https://botmaker.com/en/clients/boti-caba-bot (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://botmaker.com/en/clients/boti-caba-bot
2. SRC-005-ARG-001 Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (2022) 'Boti se incorpora como nuevo canal para realizar consultas y trámites de atención social', Buenos Aires Ciudad, 18 April. Available at: https://buenosaires.gob.ar/desarrollohumanoyhabitat/atencion-social/noticias/boti-se-incorpora-como-nuevo-canal-para-realizar (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://buenosaires.gob.ar/desarrollohumanoyhabitat/atencion-social/noticias/boti-se-incorpora-como-nuevo-canal-para-realizar
3. SRC-001-ARG-001 Microsoft (2024) 'Buenos Aires City: How generative AI is revolutionizing the lives of millions with Azure OpenAI Services', Microsoft Customer Stories. Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en/customers/story/21596-government-of-the-city-of-buenos-aires-azure-open-ai-service (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://www.microsoft.com/en/customers/story/21596-government-of-the-city-of-buenos-aires-azure-open-ai-service
4. SRC-002-ARG-001 Microsoft News Center Latinoamérica (2024) 'Buenos Aires: una ciudad cada vez más inteligente con Boti usando IA', Microsoft News Center, 13 August. Available at: https://news.microsoft.com/es-xl/buenos-aires-una-ciudad-cada-vez-mas-inteligente-con-boti-usando-ia/ (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://news.microsoft.com/es-xl/buenos-aires-una-ciudad-cada-vez-mas-inteligente-con-boti-usando-ia/
5. SRC-003-ARG-001 OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (2023) 'Boti, the City's WhatsApp!', OPSI Innovation Case Study. Available at: https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/boti-the-citys-whatsapp/ (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/boti-the-citys-whatsapp/
6. SRC-006-ARG-001 Windows Forum (2024) 'Public AI Chatbots in Madrid and Buenos Aires Backed by Azure OpenAI', Windows Forum, 2024. Available at: https://windowsforum.com/threads/public-ai-chatbots-in-madrid-and-buenos-aires-backed-by-azure-openai.394536/ (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://windowsforum.com/threads/public-ai-chatbots-in-madrid-and-buenos-aires-backed-by-azure-openai.394536/