Beijing forum on rapid response to public complaints opens, spotlighting AI
The 2026 Beijing Forum on rapid response to public complaints opened on Monday, presenting research findings, reports on city hotlines and global case studies on urban governance. Digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are a central theme of the two-day event, according to the organizers' release.
- The 2026 Beijing Forum on rapid response to public complaints opened on Monday and runs for two days.
- The Beijing 12345 hotline covers services from energy and transport to healthcare and housing.
- According to the release, the hotline has handled approximately 200 million requests from individuals and businesses.
- Since 2019 the hotline has moved from a call center to a management center using big data and AI.
- Tuesday's program includes parallel sessions and visits to local communities.
The 12345 hotline at the center of the forum
At the heart of the event is the Beijing 12345 hotline, a unified platform for municipal public services. Residents use it to report problems, file complaints and look up information on public services, ranging from energy supply and transport to healthcare and housing.
According to the release, the hotline has so far handled approximately 200 million requests from individuals and businesses.
From call center to AI-assisted management
The release says that since 2019 the hotline has evolved from a traditional call center into an intelligent management center that relies on big data and artificial intelligence. The data it generates helps identify recurring problems and serves as a basis for policy decisions.
In this way, the release states, the everyday concerns of the public are turned into prompts for improving city services.
Two days of sessions and site visits
The forum runs for two days. For many participants, it is a chance to learn from Beijing's experience in urban governance and to explore ideas that could be applied in their own cities.
Discussions continue on Tuesday with further parallel sessions and visits to local communities. Participants will have the opportunity to see for themselves how public services and city management work in practice.
What it means for other cities
The forum is framed as a place for city officials and other participants to compare approaches to handling public complaints. The release presents Beijing's hotline as an example of how complaint data and AI can feed into service improvements and policy. It does not provide performance figures beyond the volume of requests handled, so the impact of the AI tools is described only in general terms.
