Polimill builds Japan's next-generation public AI infrastructure

Polimill began with Surfvote, a platform where citizens can exchange views about politics and society. As the company worked with local governments, it saw a structural challenge: public-sector teams were consumed by daily operations and had little time to reflect citizens' voices in policy.

To expand civic participation, Polimill first needed to make government work itself more efficient. The company started building a generative AI platform for public-sector workflows and released QommonsAI in October 2024. Today, QommonsAI provides specialized AI across areas such as assembly response, public services, social welfare, and legal search. About 1,050 municipalities and about 550,000 public employees across Japan now use it. Built with OpenAI technology, QommonsAI is evolving beyond a staff productivity tool into what Polimill sees as a public OS for municipal work in Japan.

One of the biggest obstacles to bringing generative AI into government was fragmented data. Each municipality has its own workflows and document formats, and past records are scattered. For example, preparing assembly responses can require manually reviewing years of minutes to ensure an answer is consistent with prefectural policy. Even the most capable AI model cannot produce practical insight if the underlying data is not organized.

OpenAI technology has also changed Polimill's development process. The company adopted Codex across the workflow, from requirements definition to checking consistency with existing GitHub code, implementation, and testing. Engineers can focus on reviewing AI-generated plans and making high-level decisions, while AI carries out more of the implementation work autonomously.

OpenAI's hands-on support has further accelerated that work. The collaboration includes sharing best practices from advanced global examples, providing information tailored to Polimill, and helping design the development process itself, including which steps AI should handle and where humans should review and take responsibility.

Codex and OpenAI's hands-on support accelerated validation and implementation cycles, increasing development speed by 3-5x.

By quickly bringing those insights into development, Polimill can keep evolving Qommons ONE. Its ambition goes beyond administrative efficiency. The time created by AI can let public servants listen more closely to citizens' voices and support them. That public OS is the future of government Polimill is working toward.

Polimill collected and standardized assembly minutes from across Japan, then used AI to add metadata and build a high-precision search foundation that works across municipalities and time periods.

The company expanded this structure beyond assemblies into welfare, laws, and other administrative domains. By bringing specialized data and AI into one platform and making it searchable through a common interface, QommonsAI turns distributed administrative information into knowledge that can be used in daily work. That structure is the foundation for Polimill's vision of QommonsAI as a shared platform for government.

OpenAI's GPT models are core to QommonsAI. In the public sector, information management and audit readiness are essential. QommonsAI includes operational controls that let administrators review feature usage history and limit which models are available according to organizational policy.