AI KNOWLEDGEBASE

Exploring how conversational AI
can transform citizen engagement

PRODUCT

AI Knowledgebase

SECTOR

Government

Work > ANBC

Community

Government

Answering thousands of resident queries during
a borough-wide service change.

Antrim & Newtownabbey Borough Council were rolling out a major waste harmonisation programme, unifying collection schedules, rules and routes across a borough that had previously operated with multiple legacy systems and different sets of rules in different areas.

Every household in the borough was affected. The change was politically visible, operationally complex, and the kind of programme where the phone lines light up the moment the first bin doesn't go out on the day a resident expected it to.

THE PROBLEM

Harmonisation was the right thing to do operationally. The communication challenge it created was the immediate problem.

New Collection Schedule

The Council was about to issue new collection schedules to tens of thousands of households at once. Every household had a slightly different question, and the answers depended on address, bin type, week of the month and the rules being introduced.
Overwhelmed Staff

Existing channels couldn't absorb the volume. Contact centre staff would be overwhelmed during the transition. Web FAQs and social media couldn't deliver an answer specific to a single resident's address. A static page couldn't tell someone when their black bin was due.
Authoritative Information

Information had to be authoritative. A council-issued answer to "when is my collection?" can't be approximate, and it can't drift from official policy. Generic AI assistants pulling from the wider web weren't going to meet the bar.
Out of Hours Support

Residents needed answers outside office hours. The 9-to-5 contact window doesn't match the moment someone realises at 8pm on a Sunday that their bin is at the curb on the wrong day.

Whatever was built had to outlast the harmonisation programme. Spending heavily on a one-off transition tool wouldn't have been a responsible use of public funding.

What the Council needed wasn't a chatbot. They needed an authoritative, always-on contact channel that could answer specific questions about specific addresses, in plain language, sourced from approved Council content and that would still be useful after the harmonisation rollout was complete.

WHAT WE BUILT

An always-on contact channel where every answer is grounded in approved Council content rather than generated freely. Built on AWS Connect, it meets residents on the channels they already use and the Council on the governance standards a public body has to hold.

01. A resident-facing assistant across web chat and mobile.

Residents can ask "when is my black bin due?" or "can I put garden waste in this bin?" in their own words, on the channel they prefer, and get an answer immediately.
02. A curated, council-owned knowledgebase.

Approved policy, service rules, schedules and location-specific information are structured into a knowledgebase the assistant is permitted to draw from. Every answer is traceable to source content, which means the Council can stand behind what it says.
03. Answers retrieved, not invented.

The system interprets a resident's query, identifies the relevant details, their address, bin type, date and finds the right answer in approved content, and replies in natural, language. It doesn't generate facts. It retrieves them.
04. Clean handoff to human agents.

When a query is genuinely complex, sensitive, or outside what the assistant should be answering, it routes to a live agent rather than guessing. Residents who need a person get one.
05. Council-controlled content updates.

The team that owns the policy can update the knowledgebase as harmonisation schedules evolve, without going back to a developer every time something changes.
06. Built on a foundation that extends past waste.

The same approach can be pointed at other council services as the Council's digital strategy develops.

WHAT CHANGED

01.

Residents have 24/7 access to accurate, address-specific waste information through the channels they already use.

02.

The platform absorbed the spike in routine queries that would otherwise have hit the contact centre during the rollout, keeping staff free for the cases that genuinely needed a person.

03.

The information residents receive is consistent, traceable to official Council sources, and updated as policy changes

04.

The Council has a reusable foundation that can extend to other services without rebuilding the underlying platform

WHY IT WORKED

The easy version of this project would have been a chatbot bolted onto the Council's website with a list of pre-written responses. It would have launched quickly, looked modern, and failed the first time a resident asked something specific.

We spent the time understanding what the harmonisation programme actually meant for residents, what the Council needed to be able to stand behind, and where generic AI assistants fall short for public services. The platform we built treats AI as the interface, not the source of truth. The source of truth is Council-owned content. The assistant's job is to make that content findable in plain language, on demand, at the moment a resident needs it.

That distinction is what makes the platform appropriate for a public body. It's also what makes it useful beyond waste, because the same approach works for any service where a resident has a specific question and the Council has a specific, authoritative answer.