When the City of Amarillo, Texas, needed to service a rapidly growing population that couldn’t afford higher taxes, it was the catalyst for exploring how AI and automation could help.

As Chief Information Officer Rich Gagnon tells Sheena Thompson, EY Government and Infrastructure AI Co-leader, a key solution was creating a GenAI concierge, Emma, to handle website requests. But with a large multilingual population, and low initial levels of digital literacy, trust had to come first. That’s why establishing a clear digital dignity, privacy and transparency agenda, and co-designing and testing the tool with residents, were foundational steps.

Today, Emma reflects the language needs and usage preferences of the community while handling around a third of all service requests and deferring around US$1.8m a year in call-center hiring.

This is the fifth episode of AI Pioneers, a miniseries featuring speakers from pioneering government organizations identified in EY data and AI reports. Listen in for practical lessons from peers who have successfully moved from ambition to impact – scaling AI to transform their organizations and how they serve citizens.  17 mins