How SAP's AI is Transforming Antibes' Smart City Budget

The city of Antibes, France, is harnessing AI to enhance its sustainable public procurement and budgeting processes.

Through SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Business AI, the city can now generate a “green” budget using intelligent automation.

This innovative approach boosts efficiency, transparency and overall sustainability in municipal operations.

Greening public procurement 

Antibes is recognised as a “pioneer of AI-driven solutions” and has twice been selected as one of the 50 smartest cities in the world, according to SAP.​

The city is focused on combining a high quality of life and strong local traditions with modern technology to support its development.​

The municipality is responsible for delivering a wide range of public administration functions and services to both residents and businesses.​

Previously, Antibes relied on manual processes for public procurement and budgeting, which were considered time-consuming and inefficient.​

These manual methods offered limited visibility into budget allocations and created a heavy administrative workload, affecting productivity and resource management.​

French law now requires municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants to “green” their budgets in line with six environmental objectives.​

To comply, Antibes must demonstrate how each budgetary operation supports these environmental axes and specify how much of the budget is allocated to each one.​

The city is also committed to aligning its budget with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), tracking whether municipal actions help address climate risk, equality, education and other key priorities.​

“By using SAP Business Technology Platform along with SAP Business AI, Antibes has transformed its public procurement and budgeting processes, achieving unprecedented transparency and efficiency,” says Patrick Duverger, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, City of Antibes.

“These solutions help ensure sustainable governance and compliance with the ‘green’ budget decree, setting a new standard for smart city initiatives.”

AI-enabled data usage

Antibes has partnered with SAP for more than a decade to address inefficiencies and support the delivery of sustainable solutions.​

Over a six month project, the city deployed SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP HANA Cloud together with SAP Business AI, leveraging the SAP AI Core infrastructure and the Joule copilot to introduce AI-enabled automation capabilities.

“Our SAP stack allowed us to use large, small or tiny large-language models, known as LLMs,” says Patrick.

“We chose the tiny models that weigh hundreds of millions of parameters rather than large models with hundreds of billions of parameters because we’re interested in semantics and language processing rather than knowledge.”

Key features of the city’s AI deployment include automated data extraction using natural language processing and machine learning to identify the main elements in public procurement contracts.​

The city also applies AI to generate budget mapping aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to create interactive data visualisations, improving overall budget transparency and visibility.

The process involved: 

• Data collection
• Budget analysis
• AI automation
• Manual adjustments.

The city has successfully linked each of its 6,000 budgetary operations to the appropriate Sustainable Development Goal, enabling the production of a comprehensive green budget.​

By mapping its budget against the organisational chart and using interactive data visualisation, Antibes can drill down to see which departments are responsible for specific budgetary operations.​

The city also uses SAP HANA Cloud to support real-time data management, helping to deliver swift and accurate analysis for decision-making.

“By combining SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP Business AI, the city automated parts of its procurement and budgeting processes to deliver a fully compliant 'green budget' with greater transparency for both employees and citizens,” says Matthias Medert, Global Head of Sustainability at SAP, on LinkedIn.

Sustainable operations

By accelerating data processing and budget analysis, SAP technology is helping Antibes improve efficiency across its public procurement and budgeting processes.​

Using AI-driven automation capabilities in SAP solutions, the city can now generate a green budget without manual intervention, which was subsequently debated in the city council and adopted unanimously.​

Through this collaboration, Antibes has so far achieved 100% optimisation of each budget credit line, with every line aligned to one or more SDG targets.

“The ‘green’ budget is a perfect use case because it’s mandatory, time-consuming and requires an understanding of French and the business context,” Patrick says.

“General-purpose AI would produce poor results, as it doesn’t recognise budgetary codes or the acronyms we use. 

“So, we had to train a specialised mode, tiny LLMs, which works perfectly.

“We used AI capabilities to qualify each budget line across the sustainable development axes, producing a ‘green’ budget classified according to the all-important sustainable development goals.”

This project, involving 138,000 automated decisions, helps to demonstrate how specialised AI could provide immediate, concrete capabilities that saved labour while promoting sustainable development.

The city now enjoys enhanced budget transparency for both its workforce and citizens.

“This is extremely important for our citizens because it gives them visibility into budgetary operations that are otherwise difficult to understand," says Patrick.

"And through a sustainable development filter, they can see that what we do improves quality of life, education and the circular economy.

"Transforming the budget into something comprehensible helps promote trust and accountability.”

Thanks to SAP's support, job satisfaction and productivity among city employees have increased due to the reduced manual workload.​

Antibes’ philosophy centres on providing an attractive place to live alongside cutting-edge services for residents, companies, researchers and innovators.​

The city recognises it cannot build all required expertise in-house, but partnering with technology leaders allows it to innovate more rapidly, test concepts and deploy them at scale.