Kommune21: Where assistance has to stop

In “Die Grenzen der Assistenzen” (The limits of assistance), Holger Kreis, managing director of Civic Patches, examines the limits of AI in public administration, which often receive too little attention in the debate.

The article starts with the years of Germany’s Online Access Act. Back then, the form was often digitised but the process behind it was not. An application could be formally complete and still unusable for the decision. The work ended up in the inbox, where staff pieced the facts together from free text, PDFs and attachments and typed them into the case system by hand.

This is where AI can help. An AI-supported application process recognises missing details and documents while the form is being filled in and asks for them specifically. The facts reach the caseworker in order.

That also makes it tempting to hand AI more than it is allowed to do. Where it has to stop is set out in the German Administrative Procedure Act. Under section 35a, a fully automated administrative act is only permitted where a legal provision allows it and there is no discretion or margin of appreciation. Where a case has to be weighed up, a person decides.

We used this limit as a basis for developing beantragt.ai.

The article (in German) is available as a PDF by kind permission of the German trade magazine Kommune21. Source: Kommune21, issue 09/2026, pages 20 and 21.