AI to Handle Calls to St. Petersburg’s Committee for Urban Amenities
The new digital assistant will route each request to the right staff member and connect callers with a human operator when needed.
St. Petersburg’s Committee for Urban Amenities has deployed an AI assistant to handle residents’ calls to its duty service. The bot answers first, listens to the caller, identifies the subject of the request and routes the person to the appropriate staff member. The system is designed to handle up to 400 calls a day and, for now, covers issues that fall directly within the committee’s jurisdiction: street and road conditions, cleaning and maintenance of green spaces. If a request falls outside those areas, the call is transferred to an operator. The system was tested jointly with the St. Petersburg State Unitary Enterprise ATS Smolnogo under the Effektivny region (Efficient Region) program.
Voice bots are already widely used across many government and utility services in Russia. But St. Petersburg’s Committee for Urban Amenities is taking the technology further with automated, meaning-based call routing. Residents no longer need to figure out which specialist handles their particular problem, while operators no longer have to transfer calls manually.
Digital Maturity
A voice assistant like this can be replicated elsewhere. That means it could soon be deployed in other municipal and regional contact centers, including utilities, road services, transportation, city maintenance and other areas where a large share of requests falls into a limited set of recurring categories. The assistant itself is expected to move gradually toward deeper automation: registering requests on its own, identifying the responsible organization, forwarding applications to an agency information system and subsequently keeping residents informed about their status.
Given the federal government’s plans to bring public administration to digital maturity by 2030, that progression would be a logical next step. Meanwhile, Russian voice automation platforms and technologies for building government contact centers could theoretically attract interest in overseas markets. Still, that is unlikely to happen until their economic impact becomes clear within Russia.
Zhenya and Aleksandra
AI assistants are increasingly proving effective at taking over some of the work performed by human specialists in municipal services and administration. Since November 2023, residents of the Moscow region have been able to consult the voice assistant Zhenya (“Eugene”). It forwards applications to the dispatch service, provides information about service outages and connects callers with an operator when necessary. In 2025, Moscow’s Aleksandra (“Alexandra”) chatbot expanded its capabilities and can now answer a broader range of questions. That same year, St. Petersburg authorities announced plans to introduce AI into the Unified Information and Accounting Center app, where a neural network will assist with intelligent search, answers to common questions, application forms and the processing of utility meter data. Also in St. Petersburg, Sluzhba 004 (Service 004) accepts questions about housing and utility services through the Nash Sankt-Peterburg (Our St. Petersburg) portal. In July 2025 alone, it processed about 79,000 questions from residents. In early 2026, a separate chatbot was created for Sluzhba 004 to help people navigate city services.
The Committee for Urban Amenities’ new AI assistant is another project moving city services toward automated request recognition, classification and routing.
Freeing People From Routine Work
How much potential the system ultimately has will depend on the next stage of automation. Today, the AI essentially serves as an intelligent dispatcher, routing most tasks to staff. The impact could become more substantial if the system can eventually resolve some common requests automatically, without an operator. A neural network is unlikely to take over specialists’ functions entirely. But AI could handle the high-volume, repetitive requests that employees process every day as a matter of routine. By shedding that workload, employees could devote more time and attention to actually solving residents’ problems.
