Industry
Public Sector
The Challenge
Planning and Approval Procedures as a "Bottleneck" for Infrastructure Investment
The Role of PwC
Innovation Partner to the Federal Government in Germany
The situation
Planning and approval procedures are considered one of the biggest bottlenecks in maintaining and expanding infrastructure in Germany. The underlying administrative processes are complex, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. This is where SPARK Workflow comes in: In the SPARK project ("Faster Planning and Realisation through AI"), the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation (BMDS) developed an AI solution as part of an innovation partnership with PwC. The solution relieves staff in planning and approval authorities of time-intensive tasks and thereby accelerates procedures. The professional assessment and the final decision, however, remain with humans.
Our Solution: An Agentic, Workflow-Based AI Assistant
SPARK Workflow was developed as a modular AI solution in collaboration with the planning law practice of PwC Legal. The AI modules handle clearly defined tasks along the entire procedural chain: from extracting relevant information from application documents, through formal and substantive completeness checks, to legal assessment and decision preparation. In addition, AI-supported objection management breaks down statements from public authorities and public participation into individual arguments and prepares them for processing.
SPARK Workflow maps the procedural workflow from end to end. The AI modules are embedded in administrative workflows and can be configured to the specific needs of each authority – for example, to particular types of proceedings, review priorities, and document templates. For the legal assessment, the solution connects to legal databases. All AI results are presented in a transparent, traceable manner within a user interface designed together with users.
Insights into SPARK Workflow
Please note: While the interface language is set to English, the images are based on actual application data from a German case. As a result, certain fields or content may still appear in German.
Dashboard
Formal completeness check
Legal review and resolution drafting
At the heart of the solution lies the legal review. Based on the relevant legal norms, the AI carries out an assessment and provides a detailed justification for the result. This is made possible by two building blocks: an AI-supported digital legal doctrine that automatically breaks down applicable law into its smallest reviewable components via interfaces to legislative databases, and a data model that links the specific facts of the case to the respective legal basis. In this way, existing law becomes usable as "applied law as code" – an innovative approach for public administration and a foundation for further use cases in the modernisation of the state.
The solution emerged from the administrative practice: together with the BMDS and a federal planning approval authority, PwC captured the procedural steps, modeled the legal review paths with the legal clerks, and developed the solution in an agile manner together with its future users.
View SPARK Workflow as open source
Open-source Code and Innovative Methodology
As an innovation partner, PwC developed the solution from its technical and legal concept, through architecture and implementation, to production-ready software – together with an ecosystem of technology partners.
SPARK Workflow is available entirely as open source and can be reused either as a complete solution or in individual modules. To ensure that the release is sustainable over the long term, an active community is being built around the solution. Engagement formats such as hackathons bring together public authorities, developers, and experts; contributions from the community are reviewed and incorporated into its further development.
Key elements of the development methodology have also been published. For this project, PwC built extensive agentic coding pipelines and likewise made them available as open source. Future AI development projects in both the public and private sectors can build on these.
"We are convinced that openness leads to better results. When code is publicly accessible, it gets reviewed, questioned, and further developed. That is what good software thrives on – and it is exactly what public administration needs."
Dr. Nicolai Bieber,Head of Public Sector Consulting and Global Data & AI LeaderGet in touch with our experts
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