Boston aims to adopt AI and analytics tools for city services in Bloomberg partnership
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Photo: Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is joining a city data alliance led by Bloomberg to get support for modernizing resident services through AI and analytics.
Why it matters: The alliance offers the city help building or streamlining certain services without added cost to taxpayers.
Driving the news: Boston is one of 15 cities joining the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, a 10-month program that promotes incorporating data into policy making.
- Boston's goal under the partnership is to use AI, advanced analytics and other digital tools to improve 311 and other non-emergency notifications, says Shin-pei Tsay, the city's research and data officer.
Four other U.S. cities are new to the program: Austin, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Kansas City, Missouri; and Newport News, Virginia.
- The new cohort also includes Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Bogota, Colombia; Lo Barnechea, Chile; Medellin, Colombia; Porto Alegre, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; São Paulo, Brazil; Toronto, Canada; and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
How it works: The alliance, launched in 2022 with $60 million, works with large cities across the Americas to better apply data to meet the needs of their communities.
- Cities get technical assistance to train staff on new technology and other resources to help cities meet their goals.
- Under the partnership, Baltimore used data to identify people at high risk of gun violence and rolled out a group violence reduction strategy. Seattle and Tampa have also used data to improve city services.
Zoom in: Boston leaders want to build tools that ultimately keep residents regularly informed in their preferred languages about trash pickup, recycling, street detours and other city updates.
- A recent city service of 6,000 residents found that 80% prefer to be contacted by text, but several city notifications come through emails or newsletters, Tsay says.
- The city still needs to finalize the problem it wants to address, but Tsay says a prototype could be build to offer text-based notifications in multiple languages for trash removal, for example.
- Improving those kinds of notifications should also reduce the volume of related 311 requests, Tsay tells Axios.