To help residents navigate municipal websites, cities are increasingly providing AI virtual assistants. Users can ask questions in plain language and get conversational responses, plus links to more information and maps for locating resources.
Arizona’s Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix and Scottsdale, uses Mari, a virtual assistant powered by agentic AI. Residents can ask Mari questions on any county government website and ideally get directed to the right place. That means they don’t have to be on Animal Care & Control’s website to search for pets available for adoption — one of Mari’s top queries. The tool can pull data from anywhere.
“That’s really to help the constituent navigate a federated environment such as ours,” said Aaron Judy, Maricopa County chief of innovation and emerging technologies. “You don’t necessarily know that this department does one thing and this one does something else. … All of that is a cognitive load that we wanted to remove from the user.”
The tool can also steer users to the appropriate government entity when a question is better suited for a city, not the county.
In Washington, D.C., DC Compass, a generative AI tool in the Open Data DC Portal, guides users by sifting through as many as 1,000 datasets to help them find, analyze, understand and share civic data. It also creates maps through a partnership with Esri, a geospatial information services company, that give the tool a show-and-tell aspect, said Stephen Miller, D.C.’s chief technology officer. For instance, users can say, “Where are ballot drop boxes?” and get a map in the response.
“Before, you had to know where to find the information,” Miller said. “Compass made the complex manual tasks more convenient and conversational, with narrative answers. You don’t have to have [a] background in data science or data analytics.”
Under a mandate from Mayor Muriel Bowser, D.C. agencies update their data in the portal every year. As a result, DC Compass uses only vetted, trustworthy data, Miller said.
Users commonly search for information about D.C.’s park system and green spaces, crime and school boundaries. At a more neighborhood level, people often look up information on public transportation, real property assessments and dining options, he said.
City services use DC Compass, too. D.C. data analysts monitored information about the IndyCar Freedom 250 Grand Prix for the emergency services department, Miller said. “One person can only do a few tasks at a time,” he said. “The rest of the people in the emergency operations group now have access to a tool that can help them identify, help them analyze — whether it’s spatial or nonspatial data — help them retrieve it, help them explain it.”
D.C.’s objective is to give its workforce and residents analytical power so they can “access what they didn’t know they had access to without really jumping through hoops,” Miller said. “It’s creating this unified experience for everyone to put them on an even footing with our data.”
