Austria wins top prize in digital government competition

Austria took first place at the 25th eGovernment competition during the Ministerial Congress in Berlin, winning recognition for its Public AI Initiative with Large Language Model as a Service, or LLMaaS.

The initiative was jointly submitted by the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Computing Centre, known as BRZ. It won in the category “Digitalization boost through AI and modern infrastructure,” the Chancellery said in a statement.

BRZ provides the infrastructure centrally as a secure service. Public authorities can use AI language models to understand, summarize and produce texts. Austria launched the initiative at the beginning of 2026.

The independent expert jury recognized Austria’s government-wide approach, which aims to deploy AI use cases and shared services securely, with national control and at scale, across all levels of administration.

Digitalization State Secretary Alexander Pröll of the Austrian People’s Party said the award confirmed the government’s chosen course. “We do not want to stop at individual pilot projects, but make secure and sovereign AI solutions available to the administration as shared infrastructure,” Pröll said. GovGPT and ida are already in use, while AI in electronic files represents the next stage.

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We do not want to stop at individual pilot projects, but make secure and sovereign AI solutions available to the administration as shared infrastructure.