Boti — WhatsApp City Assistant

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-15

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

Buenos Aires put city hall into WhatsApp: the AI chatbot Boti handles millions of conversations a month, from renewing licences to booking vaccinations. In 2024 it moved to generative AI (GPT-4o) for natural-language replies.

Live 📅 since 2019 🤖 Uses AI

Outcome🎯 Succeeded

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byGobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (GCBA)

Scale🏙️ City-wide

📊 Impact

Launched 23 February 2019 as one of the first government services on WhatsApp; monthly conversations grew from ~600,000 in 2020 to 6 million+ in 2021 and a record 11 million in January 2022, topping 26 million in Q1 2022. Now uses Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o).

🎓 Lesson

Meet citizens in the app they already use instead of building your own.

🏛️ Governance Artificial intelligence Digital government

Sources

↗ Ciudad de Buenos Aires (authority)Official city page; supports launch date and the 600k/2020 -> 6M/2021 -> 11M (Jan 2022) -> 26M (Q1 2022) conversation figures.

↗ OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (research)Independent write-up of the project, launch date and services.

↗ Ciudad de Buenos Aires — Boti + ChatGPT (authority, currency)2024 upgrade to generative AI (Azure OpenAI/GPT-4o); confirms project is still live and evolving.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇸🇬 Smart Nation Initiative · Singapore Two routes to digital government: Boti put city services inside WhatsApp in 2019; Singapore built its own Singpass ID and LifeSG app. 🇩🇪 „Aufenthalt Digital“ Goes AI · Offenbach Two AI citizen services: Boti is a city-built WhatsApp bot (2019); Offenbach reused a shared national residence-permit AI tool in 2026. 🇦🇪 Digital Dubai · Dubai Own app vs borrowed app: Buenos Aires reached citizens inside WhatsApp with Boti (2019); Dubai built its own DubaiNow super-app (2014).

Explore the wider context

💸 The Price Nobody Publishes 🤖 Artificial intelligence guide 🏙️ Buenos Aires city profile 🏛️ Governance projects 🤖 AI in Action 📖 Adaptive traffic signals 📖 Civic participation platform 📖 Digital identity

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Boti — WhatsApp City Assistant” — Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/buenos-aires-boti/ (last verified 2026-07-15). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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