The Latvian State Revenue Service (SRS) oversees the accounting and collection of tax payments, ensuring compliance with state regulations. To support its customer support operations, SRS partnered with Tilde to build Vidis—an enterprise knowledge management system powered by generative AI.
Initially, the pilot project aimed to test whether generative AI could craft ready-made responses to customer queries using SRS’s resources. Through the process, it became clear that Vidis is better suited as a support tool for consultants, helping them draft response templates instead.
Client: State Revenue Service (SRS)
Industry: Tax administration
The need to reduce time spent searching
SRS employees regularly consult a wide range of detailed legal documents to accurately answer customer questions. Finding the right information takes time, which slows down their work and delays responses to customers.
SRS wanted to test a solution to see how AI could help improve consultant workflows by generating responses to customer inquiries related to tax administration.
From concept to Vidis’ prototype
To meet SRS’s needs, Tilde developed Vidis, an enterprise knowledge management system prototype built using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology.
RAG leverages a retrieval mechanism to access data from a defined knowledge base, ensuring that generated outputs are accurate, up-to-date, and based on trusted documents provided by the organisation. This makes it an ideal solution for tasks requiring precision and relevance, such as SRS’s operations.
To ensure Vidis could provide reliable answers, a comprehensive knowledge base was developed. This included a curated library of documents, such as guides, legal texts, and FAQs, all converted into a format optimised for AI training. This ensured that Vidis could reference SRS’s resources when generating responses.
Then, Vidis was refined to handle informal, conversational queries. Examples of typical customer questions and SRS’s usual response style were integrated to ensure the system provided answers in a user-friendly manner.
With the prototype in place, the next step was to evaluate its performance through testing.
Insights, adjustments, and progress
Vidis underwent two rounds of testing with SRS employees, revealing key insights into its performance and areas for improvement.
During the initial testing, many of Vidis’ answers were incorrect or incomplete. This was due to gaps in the knowledge base and the need for better alignment with SRS’s specific guidelines.
After reviewing the results, the knowledge base was expanded to include more detailed information, and the system prompts were adjusted to ensure clearer, more structured responses. These refinements significantly improved Vidis’ performance.
In the second round of testing, over half of the answers provided by Vidis were deemed as correct, demonstrating significant progress.
Collaboration with SRS experts was essential throughout this process. Their feedback on common customer queries and their insights into system performance guided the improvements, showing the importance of teamwork in developing effective AI solutions.
The testing process also helped refine SRS’s understanding of Vidis’ potential. While initially envisioned as a tool for generating fully prepared answers, the project showed that Vidis is most effective as a support tool for drafting response templates.
Empowering employees with efficient, AI-driven answers
The prototype of Vidis, the chatbot pilot solution built on generative AI, offers several key benefits to SRS consultants:
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Vidis can understand user queries even when receiving questions in simple language that contain grammatical errors.
- Formatted responses. Answers are structured to match SRS’s communication style, including greetings, signoffs, and links to additional resources, where relevant.
- Feedback tools. Consultants can rate responses, enabling continuous refinement and improvement.
The system runs on Microsoft Azure, ensuring data privacy and compliance with EU regulations. While Vidis is not meant to replace human expertise, it can handle straightforward questions, allowing consultants to provide customers accurate responses faster.
A milestone for public sector innovation
SRS has shown forward-thinking leadership by being one of the first public sector organisations to explore the use of AI for improving internal processes. The project journey revealed that AI is best suited as a support tool for consultants rather than a standalone solution for ready-made response generation. While Vidis has demonstrated clear potential, further refinements and an expanded knowledge base are needed to enhance its effectiveness. The pilot project suggests that, with additional development and adjustments, Vidis could become a reliable solution for SRS consultants in the future.
I would like to thank all Tilde partners involved in the project for their work, passion and professionalism in our collaboration. Experience in such an innovative project allowed us to gain valuable insights and we are confident that the knowledge we acquired will be essential for our future growth. Our motto is – together we create an even better Latvia. We are therefore pleased that Tilde’s partners have made it possible to take a step towards more efficient, faster and high-quality servicing of our taxpayers, thus a step closer to our goal.
– Jānis Upmanis, Deputy Director General at SRS
