City of Antibes: Pioneering AI-driven automation in public procurement and budgeting processes
Setting a new standard in smart city initiatives
A leader in AI-driven smart city solutions, the city of Antibes, France, wanted to improve its public procurement and budgeting, especially in the sustainability area. Using SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP Business AI allows the city to produce a “green” budget through automation while improving process efficiency, transparency, and sustainability.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Government | Antibes, France | 3,000 employees |
reduction in manual workload.
improvement in budget visibility and compliance with the green budget decree.
alignment of budget allocations with sustainable development goals.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, City of Antibes
Streamlining and greening public procurement and budgetary processes
The dynamic French city of Antibes is a pioneer of AI-driven solutions that has received international recognition, having been twice elected as one of the 50 smartest cities in the world. Antibes prides itself on merging a good quality of life and strong traditions with technological innovation. Alongside its picturesque city center and popular beach is Sophia Antipolis, the French Silicon Valley.
The municipality is tasked with delivering wide-ranging public administration and services for its residents and businesses. Its population fluctuates greatly, from 80,000 inhabitants in winter to 250,000 in summer. Whether it’s providing culture, sports, building permits, energy, water, or digital services, the city needs to absorb this threefold increase in population while maintaining its high-quality, efficient services.
The city was using manual processes for its public procurement and budgeting, which were time-consuming and error prone, leading to inefficiencies and delays. It had limited visibility into its budget allocations and spending, hindering accountability and compliance. Plus, the heavy manual workload impacted its resource management and employee productivity.
Antibes is obliged to comply with a new French law requiring municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants to “green” their budgets in line with six environmental objectives. This means the city must explicitly outline how budgetary operations contribute to these environmental axes and declare how much money goes into each in percentage or monetary terms for each operation. Antibes is also committed to aligning its budget with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This assesses whether the municipality’s actions will help address climate risks and improve education and equality, for example. With 6,000 budgetary operations in a typical year, calculating these allocations proved highly complex. The city needed new tools to manage thousands of data points and highlight how its money was being spent.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, City of Antibes
Delivering AI-enabled automation to extract and visualize data and map budgets
The city has had a partnership with SAP spanning more than a decade, relying on several innovative solutions to help deliver its services. The public body carried out a six-month project using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP HANA Cloud with SAP Business AI, specifically the SAP AI Core infrastructure and the Joule copilot, to deliver AI-enabled automation capabilities. Speaking about the choice of AI model, Patrick Duverger, chief information officer and chief technology officer for the city, explains, “Our SAP stack allowed us to use large, small, or tiny large-language models, known as LLMs. We chose the tiny models that weigh hundreds of millions of parameters rather than large models with hundreds of billions of parameters because we’re interested in semantics and language processing rather than knowledge.”
Key features included automated data extraction using natural language processing and machine learning to extract the main elements from public procurement contracts. There was also budget mapping to align budget lines with SDGs and interactive data visualizations to provide better visibility. The process involved data collection, budget analysis, AI automation, and manual adjustments, helping provide transparency and compliance with the green budget decree. The city was able to allocate each of its 6,000 budgetary operations to the relevant sustainable development goal and produce a green budget. In addition, by mapping the budget with its organizational chart and using interactive data visualization, the city can drill down to identify the different departments that are responsible for various budgetary operations. The city also leveraged SAP HANA Cloud for real-time data management, helping ensure swift and accurate analysis.
Antibes also engaged in change management and user training to encourage successful solution adoption.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, City of Antibes
Enhancing efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in operations
Faster data processing and budget analysis improved efficiency in the city’s public procurement and budgeting processes. Using the AI-driven automation capabilities in SAP solutions, it was able to produce a green budget without any manual effort, which was debated in the city council and adopted unanimously. And it achieved 100% optimization of each budget credit line allocated to one or more SDG targets. This project, involving 138,000 automated decisions, demonstrated how specialized AI could provide immediate, concrete capabilities that saved labor while promoting sustainable development. And automation reduces errors and helps improve decision-making, compliance, and governance.
The city now has better transparency of its budget for both its workforce and citizens. Duverger continues, “This is extremely important for our citizens because it gives them visibility into budgetary operations that are otherwise difficult to understand. And through a sustainable development filter, they can see that what we do improves quality of life, education, and the circular economy. Transforming the budget into something comprehensible helps promote trust and accountability.” Job satisfaction and productivity of city employees have risen due to the decrease in manual workload, as it frees them up for more value-adding tasks. They’re also taking pride in collectively contributing to a greener future.
Antibes’ philosophy is to offer both an attractive place to live and cutting-edge services for residents, companies, researchers, and innovators alike. The city knows that it can’t develop the expertise alone, but working with technology leaders enables it to innovate faster, test ideas, and implement them on a real-world scale. It sees this as vital in transforming a city intelligently. With SAP BTP, SAP AI Core, and Joule, the city believes it has the winning combination to deliver AI models to its users. It has shown how small large-language models can be adapted, fine-tuned, and specialized for use cases in the public sector. Antibes is now significantly improving efficiency, transparency, and sustainability, setting a new standard in smart city initiatives.
Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, City of Antibes
Furthering AI use in cybersecurity, communications, and documentation
With a vast amount of data to analyze, the city’s next AI project will be in cybersecurity. Working with the team in SAP Labs France, the city is analyzing text and architecture documents that describe its IT infrastructure to identify, assess, and resolve potential weak points. It’s also considering using AI to automatically classify thousands of citizens’ requests—received by e-mail, in person, and through its citizen portal—before directing them to the right department without any human intervention.
Another task well-suited for AI would be to automatically summarize city council meeting minutes by topic, department, and decision and directly integrate the minutes into its internal documentation. Another activity could be predictive maintenance for municipal vehicles, using IoT sensors to anticipate breakdowns and schedule repairs at the right time—avoiding service interruptions.
Duverger concludes, “AI must always remain a tool to assist humans, not replace them. In the public sector, we have a duty of accountability and responsibility. A decision must always be made by a human. AI can prepare, sort, and classify, but it can never decide in place of an elected official or a civil servant.”
Want to know more about City of Antibes?
How Antibes Is Reimagining Public Procurement to Be AI-Powered, Risk-Aware, and Value-Driven (SAP Innovation Awards 2025)