KC counties adopt AI assistants
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The UG municipal building. Photo: Travis Meier/Axios
Wyandotte and Jackson counties are using AI chatbots to respond to residents' questions faster.
Why it matters: Local governments say a deluge of basic questions bogs down employees and increases wait times for residents seeking information.
Driving the news: The Unified Government (UG) of KCK and Wyandotte County recently added a chatbot built by Granicus, a digital government platform, to its Treasury page.
- Jackson County uses a similar bot, called the Government Experience Agent, to field questions about its Assessment Department after years of tax spikes and public outcry.
- Olathe also uses the Granicus bot, which pops up on the city's home page.
Zoom in: The UG Treasury Department was struggling to keep up with the roughly 70,000 calls it receives per year, reassigning employees to answer routine questions already addressed online.
- Residents also needed answers after hours and in multiple languages, and they often didn't get the right answer the first time they phoned in, UG innovation director Crystal Sprague said in a statement.
- The UG did not respond to Axios' questions.
By the numbers: Typical 311 calls to the UG take about 2.5 minutes, while chats with the Granicus bot take about 1.3 minutes across many government agencies, per company data.
- Granicus says about 36% of questions come in between 6pm and 9am, and the UG has used the tech to translate answers into more than 30 languages.
How it works: Government websites are often difficult to navigate, and the UG's chat window acts like a sophisticated search engine that can understand conversational questions and cut through red tape.
- The chatbot also provides instructions for things including paying taxes and watching Board of Commissioners meetings.
Yes, but: If you want to leave feedback, it's unclear where the feedback goes — and the AI agent wouldn't tell me.
- And both the UG and Granicus store and use some data shared through the chat and cookies.
What they're saying: "Personal information is protected and redacted, and residents' questions and conversations are never used to train the underlying AI models or monetized," Karthik Anbalagan, general manager of emerging tech at Granicus, tells Axios.
- "Our agents answer only from agency-approved information, and each agency stays in control of what the agent can access and what actions it can take."
- Granicus says it meets government cybersecurity standards and guidelines.
What's next: The UG plans a bigger rollout of the agent across its website, but it's unclear when.
Go deeper: KCMO already adopted AI for 311 services.