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Halden Municipality
How Halden Municipality gave 2,000 employees access to generative AI without compromising on privacy or security.
Halden is the largest municipality in Østfold, with around 2,200 employees serving more than 30,000 residents. The municipality has set out to become Norway's most innovative — building on a strong local ecosystem of high-tech industry, ICT, research, and development. By working closely with the business community, Halden is shaping the future of both its workplaces and its city.
How do you make AI available to employees in the Public Sector, without risking data leaks?
Halden Municipality in Norway has shown that it can be done. They came to Ayfie wanting to explore how AI could improve efficiency and everyday work across departments without compromising privacy or security. Together with Ayfie, the municipality can offer an internal platform where all 2000 employees can experiment with and apply generative AI in daily tasks.
The municipality’s IT and digitalization team, led by Øyvind Grandahl, set a clear goal: to build AI competence across the entire workforce and test how AI could support and improve public service
"We wanted an alternative that could safely be made available to everyone, without any risk that uploaded content, instructions or documents would leak."
Øyvind Grandahl, Head of Digitalisation, IT, Communication and Development, Halden Municipality
The solution: Ayfie Assistant
To succeed, they needed both training for the entire staff, as well as pre-determined prompts together with Ayfie Assistant. Today Ayfie is the internal platform where employees can use and swap between the most known language models in the market, upload documents and chat with their systems, without being afraid of security breaches.
Halden partnered with Ayfie and Frend Digital to deliver a municipality-wide AI training program and deploy Ayfie’s platform behind the municipal firewall.
Training that built real competence
The programme reached employees at every level:
250 employees completed introductory courses on generative AI and prompt design
70 employees joined workshops focused on building predefined instructions and AI agents for specific functions
2,000 employees gained access to a secure, internal AI environment connected to Halden's own data sources
"Unlike consumer tools, Ayfie gives factual answers and shows the source of the information. This is not about buying more apps. It's about unlocking the knowledge that's already there, and making it available in a ChatGPT-like interface."
Hege Nikolaisen, COO, Ayfie
The Impact
Halden has already seen clear effects from its adoption of AI.
Over 40,000 documents and 20,000 journal entries processed automatically, saving significant time for employees.
Two administrative positions reallocated due to improved efficiency.
Employees have gained practical experience with AI, which has fostered engagement and increased understanding of the technology.
All data processing is done internally and the solution complies with current laws and guidelines for privacy.
What's Next?
Advancing usage
The municipality is now preparing the next phase of its AI program with Ayfie's Index. The Index is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution enabling employees to retrieve verified information directly from the municipality's internal documents, procedures, and knowledge bases regardless of format, server or type of software. This could help them with:
Case processing: analyse incoming applications, check for required information, request missing details, and draft decision proposals based on municipal guidelines, criteria, laws and regulations particularly within health, care, and NAV-related services.
Management information: Identifying how Ayfie can retrieve and compile relevant data across finance and HR systems, giving leadership reliable insight and aggregated decision-support.
Finance: Looking to automate daily, weekly, monthly or annual comparisons, reports, or forecasts to support planning and resource management.
HR, intranet and documentation: Assessing how information from the intranet and the municipality's procedure/routine library (Samsvar) can be combined into a unified AI-supported access point for employees.
