Robots have already saved 45,000 hours of work for CAIB civil servants

PalmaComputer robots have already taken on the equivalent of more than 45,500 hours of work from public employees of the Autonomous Community in just two years. This is one of the most concrete figures with which the Government defends the results of its administrative simplification policy: the automation programs implemented at the CAIB have intervened in more than 432,000 files and 70,000 documents, mainly to take on repetitive tasks that until then had to be done manually by civil servants, according to data provided by the Executive to ARA Balears.

The figure, however, coexists with a much less optimistic reality outside the Administration's offices. Hoteliers, architecture firms, farmers, small businesses, and the self-employed continue to report slow procedures, information that must be submitted more than once, duplicate inspections, and administrations that do not always share the data they already have. In other words: the Government can prove that certain internal tasks have been automated, but this does not necessarily mean that the citizen already perceives a faster Administration.

And this is precisely one of the questions left open by the figure of 45,500 hours: how many of these saved hours have actually translated into fewer days or months of waiting for the citizen?

Robots for repetitive tasks

These are not physical robots nor, in most cases, systems that autonomously decide whether aid should be granted or denied. They are programs that automatically execute administrative operations based on previously defined rules: consulting information, verifying data, classifying or moving documents, and executing mechanical phases of a file.

According to data provided by the Government, the robots have allowed civil servants to save 45,500 hours of repetitive work, time that the Executive claims has been dedicated to tasks of greater value. Automation has already been introduced in different phases of the Guaranteed Social Income (Resoga), Fogaiba files, procedures linked to renewable energy and especially self-consumption, and rental aid, among other procedures.

The philosophy is simple: let a machine perform the routine checks that do not require human judgment and let public employees focus on the phases of the files that do require assessment, technical knowledge, or decision-making.

7.6 million more to multiply the robots

The Executive considers that the pilot project has worked and now wants to scale it up. It has launched a tender of 7.6 million euros, six times higher than the initial investment, to extend this system.

Of this amount, 4.4 million euros will be allocated to expand the use of robots and 3.2 million to implement process mining tools. This technology should allow for analyzing how administrative procedures work and detecting bottlenecks, duplications, and inefficiencies before deciding where it is most useful to automate. This second pillar is significant because it points directly to one of the problems reported by those administered: it is not always enough to automate a step if the complete procedure continues to contain duplicate processes or phases that unnecessarily lengthen the resolution.

Simplification goes beyond robots

The Executive includes these advances within a much broader package of administrative simplification. In the tax field, for example, up to August of this year, 188,240 payments had been made through Bizum, for a combined value of 22.2 million euros. The flexible payment system had been used by 2,279 taxpayers, while the Single Real Estate Transfer Declaration allows grouping different tax obligations derived from a sale into a single declaration.

Mechanisms have also been applied to avoid certain duplicate procedures in dependency and disability. The so-called gateways allow, in some cases, recognizing degrees of disability by taking advantage of dependency assessments that the Administration has already carried out, without forcing the person to go through the entire procedure again.

During 2025, 4,783 of the 14,482 disability resolutions, 33% of the total, were made through these equivalencies. By August 31, 2026, 3,774 had been resolved in this way, nearly 28% of the total.

45,000 hours saved, but how many fewer months of waiting?

The balance sheet offers, therefore, figures that allow us to verify that certain parts of the Administration have changed. But there is a piece of data that the Government does not provide in this count and that is more difficult to measure: how much the actual processing times for files have been reduced thanks to automation. And it is here that the distance between the Executive's vision and that of the citizens and companies that have to interact daily with the Administration contrasts. Criticisms of the slowness and duplication of the Administration are widespread, although sources from the Executive ask for patience because they admit that after decades of building a bureaucratized model, "changing it will not be simple," they point out.