Facing demographic change and a growing lack of qualified personnel, the town of Nettetal is embracing digital transformation and artificial intelligence to secure the long-term efficiency of its public administration. T-Systems supports this initiative by delivering AI-based technologies and digital solutions tailored to the needs of the municipal administration and its workforce.
Nettetal is located in the west of North Rhine-Westphalia directly on the Dutch border. This town in the district of Viersen has 43,500 inhabitants and, with its lakes and forests, is a well-known local recreation area for the Rhine-Ruhr region. It was not created until 1970, when various smaller communities merged to form the town. They named themselves after the Nette, which flows through the town area.
Shortage of skilled workers in public administration is an issue in Nettetal. It is already foreseeable that a large proportion of employees will retire from working life by 2030. At the same time, not enough young people are moving up. Against this background, studies predict that hundreds of thousands of positions in the administration can no longer be filled. With the clock ticking, what can be done?
“We are consistently using the opportunities offered by digitalization in order to combat the foreseeable shortage of skilled workers and continue to function as a town administration,” explains Thorsten Rode, head of the town administration’s IT service. In recent years, the administration in Nettetal has established a digital, employee-centered culture: the 580 employees understand the potential, undergo continuous training and, of course, use modern digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) for their work.
The pre-formulation of business emails, the creation of dossiers or the writing of notes are tasks that arise constantly and from which AI can substantially relieve employees. AI can also accelerate less frequent tasks, such as creating concepts or conducting research within the comprehensive database of the authorities. “Our plan was to make every workplace AI-assisted. All employees should have access to an AI chatbot.” However, it was clear: “We also process confidential, personal and even social data. The use of AI must be based on the level of protection required for the data,” adds Rode.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can significantly simplify and accelerate many everyday processes within public administration. With the AI Foundation Services from T-Systems, we have found the perfect platform to realize our three-zone concept. It combines sovereignty with a wide range of AI models.
Thorsten Rode, Head of IT Service, Municipality of Nettetal
“We decided to introduce a hybrid system for AI use,” explains Thorsten Rode, Head of the Municipal IT Service, town of Nettetal. In the green zone, employees have maximum control and security, allowing even confidential and social data to be processed in a legally compliant manner. A yellow zone enables the processing of personal data, while a red zone offers maximum flexibility and access to high-end models, excluding confidential data. “By combining these three zones, we achieve maximum benefit with minimal resource use,” says Rode. “Digital sovereignty is maintained through our own infrastructure, while flexible scalability and demand-based billing ensure cost efficiency.”
The town began building the green zone in 2024 using its own GPU servers and open-source LLMs, including Qwen 32B. “All prompts, data, and results remain in-house,” Rode explains. To support more advanced use cases, Nettetal added the yellow and red zones. With T-Systems’ AI Foundation Services, the town gained access to a broad portfolio of models through a sovereign cloud. “The combination of model variety and scalable sovereign cloud infrastructure is unique in the market,” says Rode. In the yellow zone, Nettetal uses open-source models such as Mistral and Qwen on the sovereign T Cloud Public, while the red zone provides access to GPT, Claude, and Gemini models via a standardized OpenAI API and token-based billing.
Using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Nettetal securely combines internal data with external models, enabling AI-powered self-service solutions for IT support, research, and urban planning. Employees decide case by case which zone to use, making training a central part of the AI strategy. Nettetal supports staff with an AI compass, mandatory basic training via the “AI Seahorse” portal, advanced courses, certificates, and exchange formats such as the AI Café.
In November 2025, the town of Nettetal received the Digital Award in Bronze for the GDPR-compliant portal at the KOMMUNALE administrative trade fair in Nuremberg – a recognition of the groundbreaking AI project. “Our approach proves that we don’t have to choose between safety and innovation. With the right concept, we can achieve both and at the same time increase productivity and accelerate administrative processes,” Rode sums up. With T-Systems, the town has a trusted partner who gives it easy access to all models from a single source in an as-a-service mode via the AI Foundation Services. Per-token billing offers the town full cost control, while the sovereign cloud helps to meet legal requirements.
T-Systems is a trusted partner for sovereign, high-performance European cloud solutions. With its AI Foundation Services and comprehensive LLM Serving Service portfolio, T-Systems enables public sector organizations to implement and scale AI initiatives securely, reliably, and in compliance with European standards. A broad selection of language models supports diverse use cases across administration and citizen services. Recognized in independent industry benchmarks, T-Systems is positioned as a leading provider in both AI and cloud services.
