From performance to service: data, digital and artificial intelligence reshape welfare
Public welfare is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by three converging forces: demographic change, pressure on public finances and technological acceleration.
By 2050 the over-65s will exceed 30% of the Italian population (source: Eurostat). Careers are no longer linear, new forms of employment are emerging and contribution discontinuities are increasing. A growing share of workers, especially young people, is struggling to build a solid pension position. Meanwhile, the demand for welfare services increases, and with it the pressure on public finances.
Welfare needs new tools: it must become more flexible, more inclusive, able to anticipate needs instead of merely registering or chasing them. Digitalisation is the necessary condition to guarantee sustainability and quality of services.
The Digital Decade Policy Programme 2030 sets the goal: all essential public services online by 2030. In recent years Italia has laid the foundations, also thanks to the PNRR, but transforming the infrastructure is only the first step. The second is to redesign the way services are conceived and delivered to citizens.
The impact of AI
Every day millions of people interact with the public administration on issues that profoundly affect their lives: pensions, benefits, job security, reintegration after an accident. A wrong answer, a delay, unclear information have real consequences. This is where generative and analytical artificial intelligence makes all the difference: it manages large volumes of heterogeneous data, improves the quality of decisions, and enables quicker responses tailored to the situation of each individual.
In welfare, solutions and responses must be reliable, transparent, and compliant. A system that gets a welfare practice wrong is not an inconvenience, it is a detriment.
In the meantime, the European legislative framework is being consolidated as a unified corpus applicable throughout the EU. The Artificial Intelligence Act (EU Regulation 2024/1689) is a crucial step in the European Union's attempt to guarantee a responsible and safe use of artificial intelligence, balancing innovation and the protection of fundamental rights.
In Italia's public welfare system, however, there is a critical node: data exist, but they are fragmented among different bodies, not always up-to-date, and difficult to cross-reference. Working on interoperability is the condition that makes everything else possible.
Almaviva for public welfare: the projects carried out
Almaviva has been working for years with the Ministry of Labour, INPS, INAIL and supports the Regions and the Job Centres on all welfare issues: social security, assistance, employment policies, especially for young people, safety at work, combating irregular work, simplifying the allocation of subsidies and social shock absorbers.
The goal goes beyond technology: it is to translate regulatory complexity into fair and useful services for people. And to build a more coherent system, less fragmented, able to see the whole person, not just his or her practice.
Proxima is the platform developed under the PNRR to manage wage subsidies by INPS, recognised at the Forum PA 2025 and SMAU 2025 Innovation Award. Its parametric model immediately incorporates regulatory changes without requiring development from scratch each time. The platform verifies documents, automates the management of applications, and supports users with digital assistants. Workers can independently monitor the status of applications and payments. The result is more transparent processes and more certain timeframes.
ComoLake Award 2023, Welfare as a Service (WaaS) is Italy's first welfare Data Hub. It provides over 150 digital services on the National Digital Data Platform and more than 200 analysis dashboards. The aim is to integrate the information systems of the Public Administration to enable it to make better decisions and make services simpler and more efficient. The guiding principle is once only: citizens do not have to provide the PA with information that the PA already possesses.
For the Ministry of Labour and INPS, Almaviva has created SIISL - Sistema Informativo per l'Inclusione Sociale e Lavorativa (Information System for Social and Labour Inclusion), which connects labour demand and supply in a single ecosystem, integrating data and services that were previously separate between INPS, the Ministry and the Job Centres. Thanks to AI, it does not just cross profiles: it builds customised pathways with targeted responses by sector, territory and individual situation. Awarded the ComoLake Award 2024, it serves the unemployed person seeking guidance and the operator who handles very different situations on a daily basis.
The FSL - Fascicolo Sociale e Lavorativo del Cittadino addresses one of the structural problems of welfare in Italia: administrative fragmentation, because it aggregates the individual and family data of each person into a single profile. Developed with the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies and the Department of Digital Transformation, it is the Ministry's new interoperability engine. The guiding principle here too is once only: each piece of information is collected once, then shared where needed. Less bureaucracy for those who are already in a bind.
Developed with INAIL - ComoLake Award 2025 - Archimede brings AI to fraud prevention and countering in the Public Administration. It identifies anomalies and risks on a national scale in advance, making the planning of audit activities more targeted, with a direct impact on the use of public resources.
In all these projects, AI makes a decisive contribution to simplifying relations with citizens. Adoption is now accelerated by the Welfare Language Model, a generative AI model trained specifically on the legislation, language and procedures of welfare in Italia, which therefore speaks the language of citizens and that of the institutions. Thanks to the RAG - Retrieval-Augmented Generation technique, it updates in real time with each new regulation or circular, without having to start from scratch. It also means a more efficient use of resources and a reduction in energy impact.
The thread that binds all these projects is summarised in Almaviva's mission in welfare: 'Giving value to people, voice to data and direction to work'
