Odense Municipality purchases 1000 Microsoft Copilot licenses and bans the use of ChatGPT
Odense Municipality has blocked ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral and other language models on its network and bought 1,000 Microsoft Copilot licenses for administrative staff. The remaining administrative staff can use Copilot through the Microsoft Edge browser. Anders Drejer Lønbæk, the municipality's chief of staff for technology, data and business IT, told Ingeniøren's AITech that the other tools are blocked by the firewall to prevent "shadow AI", meaning the use of unapproved chatbots.
The reason given is protecting citizens' data. Lønbæk says it is hard to know where data ends up when free, browser-based models are used, and that blocking them lets the municipality keep track of what is going on. Within Copilot, he says, material one employee shares is not passed on to a colleague's Copilot unless it is deliberately shared, which gives data protections the municipality says it cannot get with other solutions.
The decision sits within the municipality's IT strategy, "Odense's Digital Future", launched in 2022. It aims to free up 350 full-time positions by 2030 through technology. So far 100 full-time equivalents have been freed up, but AI has not been the main driver. Most of the gains come from robotic process automation, self-service solutions and new specialised software systems. The strategy starts from the principle that needs come before technology.
Lønbæk says legislation is holding back AI use. The government talks about freeing up as many as 30,000 full-time equivalents, but he calls the legislation needed to make that possible "woefully lacking". The municipality constantly ends up debating the legal basis and whether a use falls within sectoral legislation.
A revised strategy, Odense's Digital Future 2.0, is due in the first half of 2027. It will give much more weight to AI and digital sovereignty, neither of which featured prominently in the original. It will keep its focus on demographic challenges, treat cybersecurity as a separate focus area, and make climate and the green transition a key theme of the digital solutions.