Growing Texas city turns to agentic AI to help with customer service

Located just outside Austin, Texas, the city of Kyle has experienced explosive growth in recent years as people look to move to a more rural area that is still within commuting distance of Austin’s thriving tech scene.

Kyle’s population has grown from around 20,000 residents in 2015 to 75,000 today. And with that growth has come a strain on city services, including an increase in the number of people asking questions and calling for service from 311, the city’s non-emergency hotline.

To deal with that, Kyle has rolled out an artificial intelligence agent known as “Agent Kyle.” Residents can report issues — potholes, hazards, broken streetlights and the like — get a projected timeline for how long it will take to resolve, track the status of their request and see on a map where other issues have been reported.

It also contains a chatbot which has been trained on all the city’s publicly available data to answer residents’ questions, whether it be the status of a development project, when trash pickup is scheduled for or when an event will take place.

The rollout comes as Salesforce has launched its Agentforce for Public Sector platform for governments, which provides AI agents to help residents and agencies complete various tasks. As governments look to provide services in a more efficient manner and rely more on tech, Kyle officials said it’s vital for continued success.

“Part of our strategy for bringing on this, this agentic workforce, has been the scalability that local government has to overcome,” Joshua Chronley, Kyle’s assistant director of administrative services, said during a media briefing last week in Washington, D.C. “We have so many residents that demand so much service, and it's so hard for us to scale up in a very similar method to the federal government.”

The platform opened to the public in March and has already benefited the city. Salesforce said Agent Kyle has received more than 12,000 requests, and almost 90% of users have their question or issue resolved within their first call. Service requests are now handled in an average time of less than 2.5 days, which is nearly twice as fast as Kyle officials had planned on.

Chronley said it has worked “shockingly well,” while Assistant City Manager Jesse Elizondo said it makes for a better customer experience if residents can see actual progress on their service request.

“The citizens of Kyle no longer have to go through five different humans and a long, drawn-out process in order to get things done,” Elizondo said in a statement released by Salesforce. “Seeing things like potholes getting fixed in real time is why working in municipal government is such a cool job. You get to build systems like this and watch it serve the public instantly.”

Having the ability to quickly answer resident questions is another major benefit of Agent Kyle. Before, Chronley said the city had around 100 phone lines set up for various departments in a call center so that customer service agents could answer inquiries. But that could be difficult, as sometimes employees may not have the answer to a constituent question, illustrating the complexity of running a city government.

“Cities are a business of businesses,” Chronley said. “I've got 30 different lines of business that we serve, everything from the police department to the trash being picked up, water, wastewater. Everything that a city does is its own unique business line. The problem is, residents think you're an employee of the city, so you know everything that there is about the city.”

That has changed with the advent of Agent Kyle, as its training on publicly available data enables it to address a wide variety of resident questions. Marco Forti, the city’s IT director, said local leaders initially fed it city council agendas and other documents so that it could prove its worth and build trust. Doing so, Forti said during the briefing, was “high value but low risk.”

Salesforce hopes that other cities will follow in Kyle’s footsteps and embrace agentic AI to help with its customer service efforts. Chronley noted that the Agentforce platform is scalable depending on a city’s size and the complexity of its government, and Kyle already has plans to expand it to code enforcement and permitting to help make those processes more efficient. It could also make an appearance in the court system, Chronley added.

Any local government wishing to do the same needs buy-in from the top, Chronley said. Executive support is crucial from the beginning, as, if individual agencies try their own initiatives, they will struggle to get momentum and interest from others.

“You'd have to have the city manager or the mayor — whoever the controlling power is in the city — really pushing the initiative, but as long as you have that, I don't think it's a big lift for any government,” Chronley said.

“The people that we have right now at executive level, they're all for innovation and leadership,” Forti agreed.