About: Gemeente Groningen
The Municipality of Groningen is the largest municipality in the northern Netherlands, serving more than 240,000 residents. Its organization spans several directorates, from public services and urban development to internal operations.
The challenge: Many initiatives, no shared framework
AI was already in use inside the Municipality of Groningen before any policy existed for it. A November 2024 baseline survey on digital collaboration showed that 5% of employees used AI daily, 11% weekly and 13% monthly, with ten to twenty experiments running across different directorates. Existing frameworks such as the Groningen Digital Ambition, the ethical assessment framework and the algorithm register guided digitalization, but not AI itself. There was no shared answer to when an AI application is acceptable and when it is not.
Following advice from the municipal Ethics Committee on Data and Technology, the executive board had committed to the council in June 2024 to produce a vision. With opinions inside the organization divided, the municipality looked for a partner who would write that vision with the organization rather than for it.
The solution: Listen first, write second
DataNorth AI was selected to guide the process with a project team of two senior AI consultants. The strength of the approach was not the writing but the order of the work: inspire and question the organization first, formulate afterwards. The frameworks grew out of what employees, lawyers, privacy officers and architects raised themselves.
The approach consisted of:
- A plenary inspiration session: A two-hour session in which AI consultant Nick Moesker levelled the knowledge base with live demonstrations, regional examples and hands-on prompting exercises.
- 20 stakeholder interviews: In-depth interviews with employees and specialists from every directorate on opportunities, concerns and organizational context around AI.
- Two working sessions built on propositions: Break-out groups on ethics, practice and policy debated more than twenty propositions, which were translated into core values and guiding principles.
The results: impact in figures
The vision was finalized in September 2025 and presented to the Groningen city council by the executive board on 3 December 2025. The process delivered the following:
Outcome
- 20 stakeholder interviews across every directorate form the foundation of the AI vision.
- 5 core values and 8 guiding principles now test every AI application within the municipality.
- 10 promising application areas have been identified and formally recorded for the organization.
Administrative adoption
- Two adopted documents: the AI vision itself and a supplementary framework covering guidelines, practical implementation and supervision of AI.
- Core values carried over unchanged: level-headedness, control over technology, fairness, sustainability and privacy appear in the adopted vision exactly as they were formulated in the working sessions.
- A workable assessment model: four modes of collaboration between people and AI, from automating to leading, make clear how much human involvement each task requires.
Conclusion
By questioning the entire organization first and writing only afterwards, the Municipality of Groningen produced an AI vision that its executive board presented to the city council in December 2025. The collaboration with DataNorth AI proves that internal support is not a by-product of a vision process, but its precondition.
