Virgilia AI: The Artificial Intelligence Connecting Municipalities, Businesses, and Local Territories
Digital transformation is no longer just about administrative processes or corporate communication. Increasingly, it represents a strategic tool to promote local territories, improve access to information, and create new development opportunities for local tourism.
This is the context for Virgilia AI – AItalian Beauty, a platform developed by the L&T Group in collaboration with Microsoft and officially presented recently at the Province of Brescia headquarters.
The project is designed as a virtual tourist office available 24/7, providing information through Artificial Intelligence via both written conversations and voice interaction.
The defining feature of Virgilia AI is the ability for municipalities, public bodies, associations, foundations, tourism consortia, and private operators to populate the platform with their own content.
Each participating partner can update events, services, itineraries, cultural initiatives, businesses, and public utility information, keeping the system up to date.
This approach addresses a main challenge in modern tourism communication: the fragmentation of information. Events, services, and opportunities are often scattered across different portals, official websites, and social media channels that are not always easy for visitors to navigate.
Virgilia AI aims to create a single point of access capable of gathering, organizing, and delivering information in a simple, immediate, and personalized way based on the tourist’s requests.
For the Lake Garda region—where dozens of municipal administrations, tourism operators, cultural associations, and local businesses coexist—such a platform could represent a highly effective tool for coordination and promotion, supporting the work currently carried out by tourist information offices.
End users can access the system for free, 24/7, in their own language. They can ask the system to plan their trip according to their preferences and receive customized responses. Public bodies and business operators can manage their own information presence, updating content in full autonomy.
The initiative also stands out for its sustainable model: it avoids the high development costs that public bodies would normally face to set up their own AI. The technological project was funded and developed by the L&T Group with Microsoft’s support to make innovation accessible and sustainable. To join, public bodies and private operators do not pay development or consumption costs, but only modest annual service fees (500€/year for public bodies, 300€/year for private businesses).
Meetings and collaborations are underway with the Ministry of Tourism, various regional authorities, and associations. The Province of Brescia is the first in Italy to integrate its information in a gradual rollout (Brescia being the birthplace of the project), launching an informational campaign for all 205 municipalities in its territory. For Lake Garda, specific preparation is planned as it is the tourism crown jewel of Lombardy, although some municipalities and operators across Italy have already adopted Virgilia.
The media attention surrounding the presentation demonstrates the interest in tools that combine Artificial Intelligence, territorial promotion, and accessibility, without replacing the human touch essential in hospitality. Virgilia is named after Virgil, the classical guide and emblem of welcome, adapted to the feminine form.
This challenge looks to the future of Italian tourism, aiming to build an international network of connected territories.
“The true innovation of Virgilia AI is not just technological. We wanted to create a tool that restores autonomy to local bodies and operators, allowing them to manage information and interact with citizens and visitors through an inclusive and up-to-date system, which also provides valuable user data based on their interactions,” highlights Luigi Recupero, President of the L&T Group and creator of Virgilia AI.
The L&T Group
Virgilia was developed by the L&T Group, a company founded in Brescia over 30 years ago with expertise in cybersecurity, data processing, and document digitization, with offices in Brescia, Rome, Catania, and Tirana. The project is based on the concept of “AItalian Beauty”: a widespread Italian beauty, composed not only of major attractions but also of local places, traditions, and skills that define the country’s identity.
Adonella
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