How SAP Business AI Enabled This French City to Thrive

Antibes, a coastal city in the south of France, is looking to AI to reshape its approach to public budgeting and procurement.

With help from SAP, Antibes has adopted a series of automated, AI-driven processes to meet strict environmental requirements and improve visibility, speed and governance across its budget operations.

Using the SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Business AI, the city has produced a fully compliant “green” budget, transforming how it allocates funds and measures environmental impact. By adopting this approach, Antibes is moving away from time-consuming manual processes to a system that provides full transparency across 6,000 budget lines.

Aligning local government with green obligations

French law requires all municipalities with more than 3,500 residents to “green” their budgets. It means cities must demonstrate how each element of their budget aligns with six national environmental goals.

Antibes, home to more than 70,000 people, is also committed to matching its public spending to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), covering a wide range of global priorities including climate action, education, equality and economic resilience.

Until now, Antibes has relied on manual, spreadsheet-heavy methods to compile its budget, making it difficult to trace how money is spent and add pressure to city staff who must manage and analyse a large volume of data. Budget allocation lacks clarity, while the heavy workload reduces efficiency and limits time for strategic decisions.

To address these issues, the city called on long-trusted partner SAP to focus on green compliance, sustainable governance and better public service delivery.

Patrick Duverger, CIO and CTO for the City of Antibes, explains: “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.

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

Automating green budgets with AI

Antibes carried out a six-month deployment of SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP HANA Cloud, incorporating SAP Business AI. This included SAP AI Core, the infrastructure layer for AI, and the Joule copilot, a conversational interface. Using these tools, the city builds automation capabilities tailored for its budgeting needs.

Key features include automated extraction of key elements from procurement contracts using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. These AI tools identify relevant text and structure it into usable data, reducing the need for manual input.

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

Tiny LLMs, designed to work on specific local tasks, are better suited to the French language, financial codes and internal abbreviations used by Antibes’ administration. This model allows the city to classify and align each of its 6,000 budget lines to relevant SDGs and deliver a structured, visual “green” budget with minimal manual correction.

The AI-powered workflow follows four stages: data collection, budget analysis, AI automation and manual review. Using this method, the city maps its budget to its own organisational chart and visualises data interactively, showing which departments are responsible for specific operations. The use of SAP HANA Cloud for real-time data management supports quick and accurate analysis throughout the process.

Matthias Medert, Global Head of Sustainability at SAP, comments: “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.”

Impact on operations and citizen trust

The AI-powered system processes 138,000 automated decisions to complete the green budget, achieving 100% optimisation of credit lines mapped to one or more SDGs. This eliminates the need for lengthy manual input and enables the city council to review and adopt the budget more easily.

“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 continues.

"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 model, tiny LLMs, which works perfectly.”

With this system, city staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time focusing on decision-making and public service outcomes. As a result, job satisfaction improves and productivity increases.

The public also benefits. Citizens can now view an accessible version of the budget that shows how money is spent in areas that matter to them – from local schools and social services to environmental protection.

“This is extremely important for our citizens because it gives them visibility into budgetary operations that are otherwise difficult to understand," Patrick says. "And, through a sustainable development filter, they can see that what we do improves quality of life, education and the circular economy."

Antibes sees this transformation as a model for future collaboration, recognising that expertise in AI and cloud computing must come from experienced partners like SAP.