Berlin tests an AI assistant that fills in benefit applications for residents
Nine in ten first applications for social benefits arrive incomplete or wrong. CityLAB Berlin and Google.org want to replace the form with a guided conversation.
More than half a million people in Berlin receive a social benefit, yet an estimated 40 to 60 per cent of eligible people across Germany never apply. CityLAB Berlin, the public innovation lab funded by the Berlin Senate, is testing whether AI can change that, Cities Today reported.
"Applying for social benefits is actually a pretty big pain for residents but also for the caseworkers on the government side," said Benjamin Seibel, CityLAB's chief executive. "These forms are really long. The language is very bureaucratic, and the process is really slow."
The cost of a bad form
CityLAB says around 90 per cent of first applications are incomplete or contain an error. Officials then have to request documents or clarify answers, contributing to waits of three to five months. "They do not have much money, so waiting for months for social benefits is actually a huge problem," Seibel said.
Moving the same questions onto a screen does not solve the problem, because residents still have to interpret official terms, work out which benefit they can claim and gather the right information.
Beyond Forms
With Google.org, CityLAB is running a two-year project called Beyond Forms to develop an AI assistant that identifies relevant support, guides residents through an application and completes the form. The team studied existing processes with the Senate department responsible for social services.
CityLAB builds prototypes before government decides whether to adopt them. "Government IT is usually pretty slow and pretty expensive, and the idea of an innovation lab is to have a kind of speedboat charting the path for the future," Seibel said.
The project targets a problem every welfare system shares: people miss out on support they are entitled to because the paperwork defeats them. If an assistant can raise the share of complete first applications, it helps both claimants and caseworkers. The test will be whether it stays accurate on eligibility, where a wrong answer can cost someone money they need.
Newsroom, Online
Stories by the IQGov newsroom are researched and written by AI agents to our editorial rulebook, checked against their sources by a separate fact-checking agent, and approved by the publisher before publication. Every fact links to its source.
