AI engineering & automation for local government
KEDO Civic is the local-government practice of KEDO Labs. We engineer AI that answers routine resident contact, triages casework, and administers the back office that swamps your teams — built around your systems, your policies and your governance. Every consequential decision stays with an officer.
KEDO Civic engineers AI for councils: resident contact, casework triage and back-office administration — built around your systems and governance, with officers holding every decision.
Every engagement starts with a scoped discovery, priced with your team before anything is built.
Discovery before any buildBuilt around your systemsOfficers hold every decision
ResidentMy bin was missed on Tuesday and the garden waste is piling up. This is the second time.
KEDOI can see Tuesday's collection was missed at your address. I've logged it with Waste Services and you'll get a reference by text. If this is urgent for health reasons, I can put you through to the duty officer now.
Illustrative resident flow. Real journeys are scoped against your services, your systems and your policies.
What we build
Phone, webchat or a web assistant that answers the routine questions from your approved information — bin days, permit status, opening hours, council tax balances — and hands anything complex to your team with the context attached.
Incoming emails, forms and documents read, de-duplicated and routed to the right service with a short summary, reference and deadline. Officers start at the decision, not the sorting.
FOI, EIR and SAR requests logged the day they arrive, clocked to the statutory deadline, routed to the right data owners and drafted from your records — with officer review before anything leaves the building.
The recurring list done by hand today: form processing, data extraction, reconciliations, redaction assistance, records migration. Measured against the process it replaces — not against a demo.
We build around the case management, CRM, finance and service systems you already run. Where an API exists we use it; where it doesn't, we engineer a safe, auditable path. No rip-and-replace.
Policy, procedure and precedent search grounded in your own documents; summarisation and first-draft assistance for the work that floods in. Answers cite their source; officers make the call.
Everything KEDO Civic automates is administrative. Decisions about residents — eligibility, enforcement, safeguarding, statutory determinations — stay with your officers. That boundary is designed in, not promised on a slide.
Evidence
The sector has moved past the pilot question. These are public findings from councils and regulators — the ground you would be standing on, not a KEDO sales claim.
South Cambridgeshire District Council reports its AI assistant fully answering around a quarter to a third of contact centre calls without transfer, after training it on the top enquiries for each service and extending it out of hours.
Lincolnshire County Council received 18.6% more FOI/EIR requests in 2025/26 than the year before — 1,992 in total — with compliance pressure concentrated in teams whose deadlines are statutory, not negotiable.
The Information Commissioner's Office has issued FOI enforcement notices to councils over substantial backlogs and missed statutory deadlines, and practice recommendations to others. Handling volume is now a governance issue, not just a resourcing one.
Councils that report real results describe the same shape: discovery before deployment, DPIAs and equalities assessments done properly, advisors involved in shaping responses, and a controlled trial in a live service before scaling.
These are other organisations' public findings; KEDO Civic makes no claim to their results. We measure our work by what it changes in your service, against baselines agreed with you at discovery.
The process
Small, provable, and governed from the start. One real process before any platform talk.
A short, fixed discovery inside the service: process mapping, the data reality, information governance, and the measures that matter — agreed before anything is built. If automation is the wrong answer, we say so here.
We build the smallest useful version against one real process, test it with your officers, and run it live under supervision. Success is measured against the baseline from discovery, with the safeguards agreed and tested first.
Only what proved itself scales. We document, train your teams and hand over — then stay on for support. Every automated action stays auditable, and your team can switch it off without us.
We do not sell a licence for software we have not proven in your environment. Discovery is where the honest answer is found — sometimes it is “not this process”, and you hear that before you spend on a build.
Standards
Eligibility, enforcement, safeguarding and statutory determinations stay with officers. The system prepares, drafts, routes and records — the judgement is human, and the policy that governs it is yours.
What was read, what was summarised, what was sent, and on whose approval. Your information governance team can inspect the trail at any time — and FOI-friendly records are the default, not an export project.
UK/EU hosting options, records-access mapped before go-live and quality-checked throughout. Wherever redaction is involved, a person checks before anything is disclosed. If we cannot meet your requirements, you hear it at discovery.
Accessibility is a build target, plain language is the house style, and officers can always take over a conversation live. Residents who cannot or will not use digital services keep a way through — by policy, not by leftover.
The boundary
Who it's for
Counties, unitaries, districts and boroughs — the arithmetic is the same everywhere. Start with the service drowning in repeat contact.
The services that generate the most contact — waste, parking, housing, licensing, council tax — answered and logged with officers' time spent on the cases that need them.
High-volume contact plus the heavy statutory load: information rights, casework routing, and back-office processing with deadlines that cannot slip.
Complex, multilingual demand and 24/7 expectations against fixed budgets. Automation that narrows the queue without closing the human door.
Two or more authorities sharing a service, one governed automation layer across all of them — with each council's data boundaries respected.
Service areas we build for
Different councils, same arithmetic: demand rises, budgets don't. Start with one service and prove it.
Your point of contact
Kofi and the KEDO Labs engineering team scope, build and run your setup — no account layer in between, no offshore subcontract. You keep your systems, your governance and your data boundaries. We fit around them.
FAQ
A scoped discovery first: we map the service, the data reality, information governance and the measures that matter, then price the work. If the honest answer is that automation will not fix the problem, we say so at that stage — before you commit to a build.
It has to. We build around the case management, CRM, finance, waste and service systems you already run rather than asking you to migrate. Part of discovery is finding the seam — an API, a safe data view, or a carefully engineered alternative — and we tell you which is realistic before we promise anything.
DPIA support is part of the work, not an afterthought. We map what personal data is touched, minimise it, agree retention with you, support your DPIA and information governance sign-off, and can run within UK/EU hosting. If your requirements cannot be met, we tell you before go-live.
No. Decisions that affect a resident's rights, entitlements or treatment stay with your officers — eligibility, enforcement, safeguarding, statutory determinations. The system answers the routine, prepares the casework, routes and records. Officers decide.
Their route stays open by design. The phone is answered as well as the web; a human handover is always available and clearly signposted; accessibility is a build target, not a checkbox. Automation should shorten the queue, never close the door.
We work with the route your procurement team requires, and we are happy to be small: a scoped discovery usually sits within officer delegated limits, with any pilot priced separately once discovery proves the case. We provide the documentation your procurement, legal and information governance teams need, in their formats.
Usually three people: the service lead whose process we are improving, an IT or systems owner for access and security review, and information governance for the DPIA pathway. The best programmes also add a member champion early — this lands better when members are briefed before launch, not after.
Pricing is scoped after discovery, per engagement — we do not publish a licence fee because the work depends on your services, systems and governance. You should be sceptical of anyone quoting before they have seen the process.
Where your security and governance require: your cloud tenancy, ours, or a hybrid, with UK/EU data residency options. After rollout we document everything, train your officers and stay on for support. Every automated action is logged so your team can audit it — and switch it off — without us.
Get started
A short call on your services, your systems and where the load is worst. We'll tell you honestly whether automation fits, and exactly what a discovery would cover and cost.
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