California city leverages AI to spur local economic, workforce development
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A grant program in San Jose aims to support AI companies that can help improve problems facing the government and the public.
San Jose, California, is looking to foster artificial intelligence innovation through a grant program that offers financial and technical assistance to support tech startups addressing civic problems in the area. Today, city officials announced the four grant awardees that offer services from food waste management, wildfire prevention and healthcare.
The pilot program, supported by $200,000 of one-time funding, aims to galvanize economic and workforce development by attracting emerging AI companies to operate in the city, said Stephen Caines, chief innovation officer and budget director for San Jose.
City officials wanted to incentivize AI companies that are growing and scaling to contribute to the expanding AI ecosystem in Silicon Valley, and to potentially attract new and recent tech graduates, he said. The city received more than 170 applications before officials and a selection committee picked four finalists whose AI solutions could help the city address public-facing problems.
“We have to be stewards of public dollars, and we would feel that would be antithetical … if we essentially funded companies that would have a negative [or] serious impact on our residents,” Caines explained. “We wanted to be able to honestly and transparently tell our community that their dollars are going toward technologies that may help them.”
One grant awardee, tech company Elythea, partners with Medicaid to identify patients with high-risk pregnancies and conduct outreach efforts to connect beneficiaries with additional assistance, like housing, food security or preventative care services.
The U.S. has experienced a maternal mortality crisis in recent years, as research shows that maternal mortality rates between 2018 and 2022 grew from 25.3 deaths per 100,000 live births to 32.6 deaths per 100,000 live births. More than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The issue is that in most cases, [the nation’s] health care system is fundamentally reactive,” said Reetam Ganguli, founder of Elythea. Plus, the onus is commonly on the patient to contact care providers or Medicaid case managers for additional support, which is often complicated by complex forms or communications systems that may deter patients from seeking support, he explained.
Elythea’s AI solution connects with Medicaid systems to automatically contact pregnant patients with potential risks that could become more severe as their pregnancy develops, Ganguli explained. An AI-enabled voice agent then asks patients about their health care and social needs and can schedule medical appointments, find assistive services and conduct other tasks on the patients’ behalf.
The AI agents are able to “have real-time conversations with [patients] and take defined actions,” Ganguli said. This model helps reduce the time it takes for Medicaid workers to manually contact and engage with patients, and helps increase patients’ access and awareness of social safety nets available to them.
Companies like Elythea offer San Jose an opportunity to work with private-sector organizations and bring tech advances to the public sector to better the community, Caines said. Elythea fits the scope of the grant program in particular, for example, because of its mission to expand access to public benefits, at a time when the federal government is cutting support to Medicaid and reproductive services, he said.
The city will also connect grantees with professional services, including cybersecurity and IT support, real estate consultation and legal services, among other supports, to help the companies thrive in San Jose, Caines said.
Other awardees include Metafoodx, which uses an AI-enabled platform to help foodservice operators and restaurants reduce food waste and streamline operations; Clika, a company that compresses and compiles AI models into hardware formats; and Satlyt, a space startup that is leveraging AI to improve satellite data processing and utilization.