Argentina's Superintendencia de Riesgos del Trabajo (SRT), the national public body responsible for regulating the occupational risk system, deployed an artificial intelligence chatbot named 'Julieta' in 2018 to handle citizen inquiries about work injury benefits and occupational risk procedures. Julieta was the first chatbot implemented in Argentina's national public administration and was recognised by the International Social Security Association (ISSA) as a Good Practice (gp/198017) in the Americas 2020 competition.
The chatbot was named in honour of Julieta Lanteri, a physician and women's rights pioneer who in 1911 became the first woman authorised by Argentina's Electoral Justice to vote in the municipality of Buenos Aires. The project was deliberately launched around International Women's Day (8 March), and the chatbot adopts a female persona depicted wearing a hard hat and safety glasses to reinforce workplace safety messaging. The conversational tone is colloquial and cordial, with the motto 'Prevention is everyone's daily work'.
Julieta was developed through a collaboration between the SRT and Microsoft Argentina, with the presentation taking place on 13 June 2018 at Microsoft's offices in Buenos Aires, attended by Microsoft Argentina General Manager Diego Bekerman and SRT Superintendent Gustavo Morón and General Manager Guillermo Arancibia. The chatbot is built on Microsoft's natural language processing technology, enabling it to understand human language and identify relevant information to answer user questions. The system features data validation mechanisms for sensitive information and requires identity verification before accessing personal worker records, connecting to the SRT's worker database to provide individualised responses.
The immediate catalyst for Julieta's deployment was the activation in February 2017 of Law No. 27,348, which reformed Argentina's occupational risk procedures and doubled the volume of consultations to the SRT's call centre. Faced with this surge in demand, the SRT opted for technological innovation rather than simply expanding call centre capacity. Julieta operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, accessible through the SRT website (www.srt.gob.ar) and social media channels.
Julieta addresses a comprehensive range of inquiries related to Argentina's occupational risk system. Users can check the status of their case files (expedientes), identify their assigned Aseguradora de Riesgos del Trabajo (ART, the occupational risk insurance provider), determine which medical commission they are assigned to, file complaints about delayed resolution of proceedings, and receive guidance on specific procedures including incapacity determinations, claim rejection appeals, benefit coverage divergences, treatment re-entry requests, and discharge disagreements. The chatbot responds to general queries about the occupational risk system and its various actors, as well as providing personalised advice based on individual user circumstances.
During development, the SRT employed a focus group methodology using internal employees to interact with the chatbot and systematically improve its performance. This iterative testing process enabled the team to double the chatbot's knowledge base from an initial set to 200 validated answers, generating 8,500 different question formulations. Most significantly, this process reduced the margin of error from 30 per cent to 7 per cent, achieving a 93 per cent accuracy rate in Julieta's responses. The knowledge base has continued to expand substantially since launch, growing from the initial 500 to 600 answerable questions to over 3,500, incorporating interconnections with external sites, videos, and integrated applications.
When first launched, Julieta handled slightly over 300 daily consultations. By 2019, the chatbot's daily volume had grown to over 1,000 inquiries, with more than 85,000 users generating 200,000 exchanges and 500,000 annual consultations over the year. At its peak, Julieta represented 35 per cent of total inquiries across all SRT communication channels, demonstrating significant channel shift from traditional phone-based customer service to the AI-enabled digital channel.
The chatbot received multiple awards and recognitions. In 2018, Microsoft recognised Julieta with an Innovation Award in the 'Conversational Agent' category for using artificial intelligence to address industry challenges and boost productivity. In December 2020, the ISSA awarded the SRT a certificate of merit with special mention for Julieta during the 'Good Practices — Americas 2020' competition, held as a virtual forum on 3 December 2020. The ISSA evaluation assessed 138 good practices from 30 institutions across 18 countries. At the same forum, the SRT also received recognition for its virtual intake desk (mesa de entradas virtual), a 24/7 platform accessible via 'e-Servicios-SRT' using CUIL/CUIT credentials for initiating labour proceedings. The SRT's Technical Manager Felipe Llorente presented the institution's AI methodology at the ISSA forum, alongside representatives from Brazil's National Social Insurance Institute and Uruguay's Social Security Bank.
Multiple SRT departments were involved in Julieta's development and ongoing operation, including systems management, administrative oversight, and customer service quality control divisions, reflecting an institutional approach to the chatbot's deployment rather than a purely technical initiative.