Kyoto Prefecture finds Copilot Chat RAG insufficient for 7,000 staff

Kyoto Prefecture's population fell from about 2.65 million in 2005 to about 2.5 million in 2025, and with fewer working-age residents expected, the government needed to handle growing administrative demand with limited staff. The heaviest burden was checking whether accounting and document work matched internal rules, which meant paging through a common manual and, when the answer was not found, waiting on the division that owns the rules. That division was itself swamped by daily emails and phone calls. The prefecture first turned to RPA, but found it effective only for routine work and too demanding in specialist knowledge for all staff to use daily. It then looked to generative AI, with Takashi Ito of the Digital Policy Promotion Division describing how RAG could let staff ask questions in natural language and pull up the needed information and source materials. The January 2025 Copilot Chat rollout was the first step, but the tool's RAG capability at the time could not handle the large volume of manuals, leaving the prefecture to look for a way to make up for that shortfall.