Austria’s social security invests over €50m in AI – just  for bookkeeping?

At first glance, “IT-Services der Sozialversicherungen GmbH” (IT-SV) is just another software company. Few people ever heard of it, even in their home country of Austria. But IT-SV is not just another software company. It maintains the software for almost all Austrian social security services and claims to look after 8,800,000 beneficiaries – in a country of 9,030,000 inhabitants.

In December, IT-SV requested bids for an array of services including speech recognition, chatbots, image analysis, and more. In total, IT-SV plans to…