Federal Council Names Five Priority Areas for AI in the Federal Administration
Switzerland’s federal government has drawn up its to-do list for putting artificial intelligence to work inside its own offices. At its meeting on October 2, the Federal Council adopted a report on making administrative processes more efficient through process automation and AI, in response to postulate 24.3582 from National Councillor Andri Silberschmidt. The aim, according to the Federal Council’s release on admin.ch, is to simplify procedures, speed up work and use available resources more efficiently.
The report rests on a cross-departmental survey of more than 130 processes, carried out in the fourth quarter of 2025, which the Federal Chancellery condensed into ten reference processes. It lists more than 70 use cases judged worth a closer look and says the gains are greatest in repetitive tasks with clear, stable processes and good data.
Five areas come first: business administration, including consultations between federal offices from the filing of a parliamentary motion to its implementation; technology-assisted translation, to support the administration’s multilingual work; review of applications and cases, to shorten waiting times and speed up decisions; data management, so that data can be extracted, standardised and harmonised; and back-office processes, where automation would check finance and procurement transactions for accuracy, contract reference, budget conformity and compliance with internal rules.
What it means in practice
The Federal Council’s case starts with people: because of demographic change and growing data volumes, the administration expects to carry as many tasks or more with fewer staff. But the report is frank about money. Because of the tight fiscal situation, it says, the resources to pursue every use case are currently missing, so efforts will be pooled on cases that matter across departments, with every department and the Federal Chancellery taking part in at least three. As a first step, the government will improve its internal overview of the AI and automation systems that the federal administration develops, buys and uses.
Translation is already a proving ground, as Ticino’s move to Apertus for administrative translation showed at cantonal level. The legal side is moving in parallel: the report notes that the justice department is drafting a bill to implement the Council of Europe convention on AI, the track behind the early-2027 consultation draft for an AI law. Parliament is paying attention too, through the new parliamentary AI group in Bern.
What to watch: the business cases each cross-departmental team must prepare for its reference process, whether Parliament funds the extra investment in data and IT infrastructure the report calls for, and how sensitive procedures such as migration cases, where the justice department leads the legal groundwork, are handled.