Ariadne’s thread in the INPS labyrinth

For decades, entering the INPS website was like entering the palace of Knossos: corridors, subsections and acronyms, with the Minotaur of bureaucracy lying in wait. Now the Institute has decided to give citizens a thread to guide them. Appropriately, it has called it Arianna. The new digital assistant powered by generative artificial intelligence was presented at the Directorate General’s headquarters, marking a real turning point in an already well-established journey of innovation.

The most significant remark came from INPS president Gabriele Fava: “For generations, citizens had to understand the State. Now the State must learn to understand citizens.” Any Italian who has tried to work out whether they were entitled to a particular benefit without knowing its name knows exactly what he means.

But how does Arianna work? The principle is simple. You describe your needs in ordinary words, even without knowing the technical name of the benefit. Arianna interprets the request and points you to the right service, choosing from more than 400 benefits: pensions, employment, support payments, subsidies, allowances, and services for businesses and professionals. It is available on the portal and in the INPS Mobile app. Director General Valeria Vittimberga explained that answers are brief and followed by questions, to understand “what the citizen actually wants”. According to the Institute, the test figures are good. Some 97% of use cases were completed successfully, 36.6 points more than the previous version. User satisfaction stands at 4.5 out of 5, up 18.4%, and about 90% of comments collected are positive.

The most interesting detail concerns the technology. Arianna works only with public information and therefore uses “standard market” models, including OpenAI, which was mentioned. Massimiliano D’Angelo, central director for Technology, explained this. For citizens’ personal data, however, INPS is developing its own welfare model based on open models such as France’s Mistral and Italy’s Velvet, managed “end to end entirely in-house”. So Arianna speaks like INPS, but for now it does not know who you are. This is also its limitation. Today the assistant stops before login. The next announced steps are assistance in the restricted area, integration with simulators, and help completing applications. Only then will we know whether the thread really reaches the exit of the labyrinth.

Undersecretary for Innovation Alessio Butti, who is strongly pushing innovation, linked the project to the government’s vision of an “agentic State”. “For a long time we have asked citizens to learn the language of public administration,” he said. Arianna, he concluded, “is a starting point”, expressing the hope that INPS will prove “contagious” for other administrations. Fava closed with the most political point: words are “the very substance of institutions” and must therefore “remain in public hands”. The State, he added, “can be complex but must never be ambiguous”. In the myth, Ariadne helps Theseus escape and is then left alone on Naxos. INPS faces a harder task: staying alongside citizens even after login. And making life simpler, since technology makes it possible. Like the myth that continues to inspire reflection and dreams.