Municipal Secretary

The profession today

Valais counts 122 municipalities as of 1 January 2026¹. Of these, 51 — or 41.8% — have fewer than 1,000 residents, with a median of 1,305 inhabitants². In these communities, the municipal secretary is often the administrative backbone: sole point of contact, institutional memory, drafter, first-level bookkeeper, and at times de facto legal adviser.

Their day-to-day duties span a wide perimeter:

• Preparing and drafting the minutes of the municipal council — often several sessions a month
• Handling citizen requests: building permits, residence registrations, certificates, complaints
• Monitoring legal compliance: adapting municipal regulations to cantonal and federal developments (LAT, LCAT, LcEaux, etc.)
• Drafting official correspondence: responses to the Canton of Valais, the Confederation, public agencies, and residents
• Managing the residents' register: arrivals, departures, naturalisations, changes of status
• Coordinating commissions: agendas, notices, archiving of decisions
• First-level bookkeeping: data entry, budget monitoring, preparation of year-end accounts with the external accountant

In the smallest municipalities, all of these tasks fall to a single person — working part-time.

What AI prepares — and what the secretary validates

Generative AI will mechanise a substantial portion of textual sedimentation and formatting work. The wording matters: AI prepares, pre-instructs, classifies and suggests. The municipality retains human validation over every legally binding document. This is not a procedural nuance — it is a legal requirement.

Assisted drafting — minutes and routine correspondence. Minutes drafted from audio transcriptions or meeting notes will be produced within seconds in the correct administrative register. Standardised response letters will follow the same path — acknowledgements of receipt, requests for additional documents, decision notifications. In both cases, the secretary reads, validates and signs. Responsibility remains personal; that is what distinguishes a public act from a convenience document.

Regulatory monitoring. Changes in cantonal and federal law will be flagged automatically, with an indication of which municipal regulations are affected and a proposal for revised text. The AI generates the alert and the draft; the secretary arbitrates prioritisation in line with the local political calendar and current files.

Pre-instructed standard request processing. Certificates, address confirmations, routine forms: these flows will be handled without manual re-entry, but under the oversight of an identified responsible officer. No legally binding act goes out without explicit human validation. For sensitive files — complex building permits, social assistance, property disputes — the AI prepares the dossier; the secretary decides.

Archiving and documentary memory. This is perhaps where the gain will be most enduring. Classification, full-text search across decades of archives, generation of summaries from past deliberations: AI becomes an institutional memory assistant that the secretary can query — provided the data is hosted in a controlled environment. See the box below.

What rises in the register of judgement

Precisely because AI absorbs repetitive work, the municipal secretary returns to what they should never have ceased to be: a guarantor of institutional legitimacy.

Contextual legal interpretation. A provision of law always applies within a specific political, human and territorial context. AI can cite the law; it cannot arbitrate between the interests of a neighbourhood and those of a project developer who knows everybody in the village.

The municipality's relational memory. Knowing that a particular family has contested a road alignment for two decades, that the municipal councillor responsible for finance prefers cautious formulations, that the district prefect appreciates a certain formalism — this knowledge does not encode itself into a language model.

Managing sensitive situations. Neighbourhood disputes, social assistance requests, a dispute over the inheritance of a land parcel in an agricultural zone: the AI prepares the dossier; the secretary decides or refers.

The legitimacy of the signature. Under Swiss law, certain acts require an identified and accountable natural person. That responsibility cannot be delegated to an algorithm.

Informal mediation. In a municipality of 400 inhabitants, half the problems are resolved before they reach the agenda. This is invisible work that AI will never see.

Who has the final word?

Composite illustration. A municipality on the Haut-Plateau must notify a building permit refusal to a developer who is also the area's main employer. The AI drafts a legally flawless letter. The municipal secretary decides to call the applicant first, to explain the two blocking points, and to suggest a reformulation of the application that would allow approval. The refusal letter is never sent. The institutional relationship is preserved. (Fictitious situation, composite of cases encountered in advisory work with French-speaking municipalities.)

Job description 2030

Job postings for this role will need to incorporate three new competencies. None of them appear in any current initial training programme for municipal secretaries.

The first is assisted compliance validation: the ability to manage an automated regulatory monitoring flow, assess the relevance of the alerts generated, and prioritise updates according to the local political and legal context. This is augmented legal judgement — not programming.

The second is governance of generated acts: reading a set of minutes, a letter or a regulation produced by AI with the eye of an institutional guarantor — detecting register inconsistencies, interpretation errors, contextual gaps. Ensuring that the data processing conditions comply with the LIPDA and the cantonal archiving requirements. This validation competency is distinct from drafting competency; it simply did not exist before.

The third is older in principle, renewed in form: citizen digital mediation. Accompanying residents — elderly people, non-French speakers, vulnerable members of the public — in their interaction with the municipality's digitalised services. The municipal secretary also becomes the translator between the assisted administration and the resident who has not mastered its codes.

Territorial anchoring

This transformed profession is a direct opportunity for Valais municipalities to maintain a quality local secretariat in the face of growing workload, without tipping into merger or outsourcing.

Today, the pressure towards pooling secretariats is real — driven by cost and workload arguments. If AI pre-instructs a significant portion of repetitive tasks, a small municipality can maintain a local administrative presence that guarantees institutional proximity, continuity of memory, and direct contact with residents.

The question is no longer "is this municipality too small to have its own secretary?" but rather "is this secretary equipped to manage the tools that allow them to guarantee the same quality of service as a town of 5,000 residents, while remaining the territory's indispensable human interface?"

This is precisely the thesis of the Bisse Cognitif applied to local administration: AI does not replace the human presence on the ground, it makes that presence economically viable where it was under threat. What remains to be built is the framework — training, data governance, tooling adapted to mountain municipalities — without which this opportunity will remain theoretical.

What decision-makers must do now

For an elected municipal official (president, vice-president)

Before 2027, commission a mapping of secretariat tasks: which tasks take the most time, which are purely repetitive, which require irreplaceable human judgement. This is not a post-elimination audit — it is a foundation for upgrading the role, justifying the investment in training, and defining data governance requirements before any deployment.

For a cantonal official (Municipal Services, DI)

Lead a continuing education programme tailored specifically to the augmented municipal secretariat, integrating both tool mastery and the LIPDA/archiving framework. The cantonal competence centres (CFPV, HES-SO Valais) are the right vehicles. The central challenge is building trust in tools that produce legally binding acts within a cantonal public law framework.

For an HR manager in an inter-municipal association

Revise job profiles and salary scales. A municipal secretary who masters AI productivity tools for administrative use and manages municipal data governance is no longer performing the same job as their 2020 predecessor. Salary upgrading is the logical counterpart to an expanded responsibility.

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¹ Canton of Valais — Key Figures 2025. ² Report on Municipal Finances 2024, Canton of Valais. ³ Law on Public Information, Data Protection and Archiving (LIPDA), RS/VS 170.2.

Jérôme Deshaie is the founder of MCVA Consulting SA, an agency specialising in AI transformation for organisations in Valais, and author of the Bisse Cognitif.