Synthetic public-sector case — A2 agent for planning dossiers

Fictional authority. The City of Mont-Rive, its territory, mandate, volumes, costs, and results are synthetic. The case illustrates a decision method; it does not prove the performance of any real tool, supplier, or public service.

Measured level: administrative A2 business agent. The system prepares the completeness review of a planning-permission dossier and, after approval, records and routes authorized effects. It does not declare a case complete, recommend approval or refusal, interpret law, or sign a public decision.

1. Mandate and starting point

The City of Mont-Rive is a fictional Swiss municipality with 62,000 residents. Its 17-person planning service receives about 1,080 applications per year in French and German. The public counter, post, and telephone assistance remain available alongside the portal.

A baseline across 386 applications measures a median 145 minutes of active human work for a standard case ultimately accepted at administrative review: check authority and signature, inventory documents, extract parcel and project facts, consult published rules, apply the checklist, prepare a document request, record the case, and assign the qualified officer.

The pilot problem is deliberately narrower than the permission decision:

carry an administratively standard dossier to a qualified officer, with every fact and rule tied to its source, without delegating power over the project or people's rights to the agent.

2. Scope and authority

“Enters the workflow” only means that the case matches the tested standard administrative path. It does not mean legally complete, compliant, or likely to receive permission.

The agent stops for paper or assisted applications, ambiguous signature or identity, a new project class, conflicting rules, derogation, third-party objection, unexpected sensitive data, unreadable plan, required site visit, equal-treatment concern, or any situation requiring legal or planning judgment.

3. Boundary between transport and public power

The agent produces no compliance, risk, priority, or permission-probability score. It does not draft the decision conclusion. The officer verifies every legal reference against the official source before use.

4. Workflow and permissions

The A2 workflow has seven steps:

1. check channel, authority, signature, and known category;
2. inventory documents and preserve each source version;
3. extract administrative facts with page or plan citations;
4. apply the deterministic published checklist for the request type;
5. prepare a missing-item list or case packet, without an opinion;
6. show sources, uncertainty, recipient, and effects to the approver;
7. after approval, send, write to the register, assign, and read back effects.

Each connector uses a separate least-privilege identity. Writes carry an idempotency key; after a timeout, read-back precedes any retry. A kill switch blocks messages and writes without removing the manual process.

5. Planning range

The range applies only to standard administrative review:

hours released / month = 90 applications × workflow share × 145 min × reduction / 60

Complete setup—procurement, integration, impact assessments, security, tests, training, and supplier exit—is estimated at CHF 48,000, followed by CHF 3,200 per month. The low case does not cover recurring cost from capacity value alone: it fails the economic gate. Simple payback is 20.0 months centrally and 9.4 months at the high bound.

The service does not decide on financial return alone. Delay, quality, access, equal treatment, traceability, officer workload, appeal cost, and service continuity remain separate outcomes.

6. Public gates P0 to P5

The EU model clauses for public AI procurement are used as an orientation checklist, not as a ready-to-sign Swiss contract. The procurement requires audit logs, change notification, a ban on dossier training, complete export, and a tested exit. Supplier secrecy cannot prevent the authority's lawful oversight.

7. Pre-live evaluation and stop conditions

The 90 frozen cases cover two languages, portal and scan, multi-page plans, heritage, hazard zone, easement, missing file, conflicting signature, unexpected health data, neighbour objection, changed rule, an injected instruction in a PDF, unavailable source, post-write timeout, and replay of the same dossier.

One false or untraceable critical legal reference, unauthorized effect, severe discrimination, loss of traceability, inaccessible appeal, unevaluated supplier change, or exceeded authority stops the pilot regardless of time saved.

8. Ninety-day pilot

• Days 1–15 — Mandate and baseline. Confirm authority, purpose, non-AI options, population, owners, measures, and stop conditions.
• Days 16–30 — Contract and frozen set. Close permissions, data, subprocessors, versions, retention, exit, and 90 contradictory cases.
• Days 31–60 — Shadow mode. The officer completes the real review before seeing the proposed packet. No resident or register receives an agent effect.
• Days 61–90 — Live A2. A qualified officer approves the message, write, and routing; public decision-making power remains entirely human.

The 270 consecutive applications provide one denominator. Time measurements compare accepted work in shadow and live conditions; monthly capacity is normalized from the actual accepted share, not counted as cash saved during shadow mode.

9. Synthetic results

Across 270 inbound applications:

• 166 enter the standard administrative workflow;
• 104 remain in the human process without refusal or deprioritization;
• 121 packets are approval-ready without correction;
• 37 require a minor correction and are then accepted;
• 8 stop safely before effect;
• 19 paper or assisted applications reach the same public officer;
• no approval, refusal, or condition recommendation is generated.

The 158 accepted packets are 58.5% of all 270 applications. Applying the 60% reduction to that complete denominator gives a weighted ceiling of about 35% less administrative time across all applications—not 60% of the planning service.

Normalized to 90 applications per month, the observations indicate 76.4 hours of monthly capacity. At CHF 78/h and after CHF 3,200 recurring cost, net capacity value is about CHF 2,757 per month, with simple payback near 17.4 months. This calculation assigns no value to a faster decision, an approved project, or an economic effect for the city.

10. Public decision and limits

Decision: authorize A2 for six months on standard administrative review; prohibit every automated planning recommendation or decision.

P5 requires a signed decision, intelligible public notice, system scope and version, owners, contract and impact assessments, language- and channel-level results, incident register, continuity without AI, and a three-month review. Expansion into compliance analysis, reason drafting, or prioritization is a new system and returns to P0.

The note AI in public administration: cases, evidence, and limits separates field results, task upper bound, public ambition, governance, data protection, audit, and procurement. Sources make the case plausible; they validate neither its figures nor the law applicable to Mont-Rive.

11. Evidence packet to hand over

The handoff contains the mandate and delegation, non-AI options, baseline and denominators, process map, verified legal bases, impact assessments, affected- person consultation, accessibility requirements, data and subprocessor register, procurement and exit clauses, permissions, threat model, frozen set, segmented results, ledger for all 270 applications, cited source versions, approvals, read-back effects, corrections, stops, complaints, appeals, costs, P5 decision, public notice, fallback, and withdrawal date.