Amsterdam’s city archive, in collaboration with Capgemini and Microsoft, developed “Chat with History,” an AI-driven chatbot that makes 750 years of the city’s archival history accessible by digitizing, transcribing, and interpreting documents, enabling users worldwide to engage interactively with Amsterdam’s past through natural language queries and bridging human insight with advanced AI technology for cultural heritage preservation and education.

The challenge: making 50 kilometers of archives accessible with just a few lines of code

How do you make fifty kilometers of paper archives accessible to everyone? From students and tourists to historians and curious citizens. The Amsterdam City Archives preserves over five centuries of urban history, recorded in millions of documents, maps, letters, and registers.

Anyone who has ever visited an archive knows how complex it can be. Old handwriting, outdated Dutch, and limited search options make the collection valuable, but difficult to access for most people.

“What has been in the dark for centuries can finally come to light. From archive to public, for the people,”

says Pauline van de Heuvel, archivist at the Amsterdam City Archives.

To realize this ambition, Capgemini and Microsoft joined forces. Together with the Amsterdam City Archives, they developed Chat with History, an innovative AI solution that allows users to actually converse with Amsterdam’s rich history.

The solution: a conversation with the past

At the heart of Chat with History is an AI chatbot inspired by Bert de Vries, director of the Amsterdam City Archives. Users can ask questions about the city’s history through a simple interface, in their own language. From “What games did children play in the 17th century?” to “When was my street built?”

The chatbot provides answers based on original archival materials that are digitized, transcribed, and translated from old Dutch to modern Dutch. These documents are then searched and interpreted using generative AI, so users receive understandable and reliable answers.

“This is intelligence made real. We show that AI has reached the adoption phase. Not as an experiment, but as a working solution with direct societal value.”

Lucas Puddifoot, generative AI engineer at Capgemini, sees this project as the essence of Capgemini’s motto “Make it Real”

The technological foundation: from data to dialogue

The strength of Chat with History lies in the smart combination of carefully prepared data and modern AI technology.

The City Archives invested in creating an AI-ready foundation by structuring data using Transkribus and Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR). This allowed the digital documents to be directly used within the AI solution.

Capgemini and Microsoft built on this foundation using technologies such as Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, AI Search, Microsoft Agent Framework, and the Speech Services Avatar. This resulted in a scalable and secure environment where archive data is not only preserved but also actively utilized.

The chatbot uses so-called agentic AI, a form of artificial intelligence that can independently make connections and provide additional context. This allows users not only to search but also to discover.

“It’s no longer about knowing where to search,” says Puddifoot. “It’s about being able to explore. AI transforms the search for knowledge into experiencing of knowledge.”

Human-AI Chemistry: technology serving stories

Chat with History shows how technology and human insight can reinforce each other. While AI is often used for business or technical applications, this project is all about human stories.

The Amsterdam archives contain the lives of real people: residents, artists, merchants, and migrants who have shaped the city over the centuries. Thanks to the chatbot, these stories are made accessible in a new way, allowing users to make a direct connection between the present and the past. This is a concrete example of Human-AI Chemistry: the natural collaboration between human and machine. The technology supports, it does not replace. Archivists and historians remain indispensable for providing context, while AI helps make large amounts of data searchable and insights visible.

Impact: history for everyone

By the end of 2025, about 2 percent of the archive will be digitized. Each new step in this process brings a larger part of Amsterdam’s history closer to the public.

For the City Archives, Chat with History means a fundamental change: from a repository of documents to a dynamic source of knowledge. The solution opens the archive to a global audience. People everywhere can converse with Amsterdam’s history in their own language.

From promise to practice: the power of adoption

Chat with History marks an important step in the development of generative AI within the public sector. While many organizations are still in the research phase, this project is already in the adoption phase. The technology is actually being applied and delivers measurable societal value.

This demonstrates that AI is no longer just a promise, but a practical tool that helps democratize knowledge and preserve culture. By connecting technology with cultural heritage, a future-proof way of making history accessible is created.

“We have turned the promise of intelligence into concrete impact,” says Puddifoot. “This project shows what happens when humans and machines work together. Not to replace, but to enrich.”

The future: keep discovering

In the coming years, the system will be further expanded with new datasets, improved language models, and additional features such as speech interaction and visual context via old maps and photos.

However, the core of the project remains unchanged: bringing history closer to people. Thanks to Chat with History, anyone, anywhere in the world, can converse with Amsterdam’s past. What once began as fifty kilometers of paper has now become a living conversation between generations. Chat with History shows how technology can bring culture to life. Through AI, the past is not only preserved but also actively experienced.