Federal Statistical Office Launches an AI-Friendly ‘Statistik Schweiz’ Portal to Keep Official Data Verifiable
The Federal Statistical Office has rebuilt its online presence around the way people increasingly find information, splitting it into two platforms and optimising its data portal for both human visitors and artificial intelligence tools, Netzwoche reported on October 30. The office, known in German as BFS, is the federal government’s central provider of statistics for the public, politics, administration, business and research.
Until now, information about the office and its statistics sat at the same address. Under the new set-up, bfs.admin.ch hosts the official site of the office itself, describing its tasks, values and fields of work, which range from classic statistics through data management to data science and AI. A separate specialist portal called Statistik Schweiz, at statistik.admin.ch, is aimed at people who work with the data. It brings together current results, indicators, publications, datasets and visualisations, and the office says users can reach the material directly or through AI tools. The familiar web addresses stay in place.
The office developed the new presence within a year under a project named New User Experience, or NUX. Director Georges-Simon Ulrich said AI increasingly delivers answers without it being clear which facts they rest on, which makes it more important for official data to be visible, verifiable and accessible to all. He also described the new offer as a contribution to the security of Swiss democracy.
What it means in practice
For researchers, journalists and companies, the change should make it easier to point AI assistants at authoritative Swiss figures rather than second-hand summaries. Designing a government site for machines as well as people is still unusual, and the move fits the federal administration’s wider AI effort after the Federal Council named five priority areas for AI in the federal administration.
It also comes as Bern prepares the legal groundwork, with the Federal Council publishing an AI code toolkit and sector report ahead of the 2027 AI law consultation. How well AI tools actually cite the portal, rather than paraphrasing it without sources, will decide whether the redesign achieves its aim.
What to watch next is whether other federal offices follow with machine-readable portals, whether the FSO publishes usage figures for AI-driven access, and how developers of Swiss models such as Apertus make use of the official data.