Raleigh embraces AI to meet residents’ expectations
Sky Noir Photography by Bill Dickinson via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
The city’s CIO Mark Wittenburg said during the ServiceNow Government Forum that it’s young and innovative population expects great things, and government must deliver.
With a growing, and young, population in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, its residents and elected officials expect Raleigh to be innovative and embrace new technology, including artificial intelligence, according to its chief information officer.
And the city has embraced the technology in ways to help make its residents’ lives easier and help its employees do their jobs better. It started at its busy intersections, where an initial partnership to simply count cars in a more technologically advanced way than manual counters has blossomed into an effort to track traffic patterns and analyze video to understand the causes of accidents and near misses.
And Raleigh’s staff can access an AI-driven service desk to file tickets and receive assistance, with the upgraded chatbot trained on content and information from the city’s knowledge base. With only 2% of service requests requiring human intervention, the city estimates it has saved $315,000 on IT service desk costs by redirecting its employees to other tasks, and has sped up employee onboarding by 66%. Case resolution now takes around a minute less per ticket, meaning one month of work has been saved in many tasks.
“To me, there's this expectation that, because we're in the Research Triangle and because we have such an innovative and young workforce, they expect the same services from their city government,” Raleigh CIO Mark Wittenburg said in an interview at the ServiceNow Government Forum in Washington, D.C. last week. “I liken it to almost what Uber did to the taxi industry: they're looking for us to do the same thing for government services, make those government services easier to get to quicker and resolve their issue.”
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however, and the initiative has needed some refinement. Wittenburg recalled during a panel discussion at the event that, at one stage, the AI-backed chatbot told a user having printer issues to “change the registry,” which is something he said he would only prefer trained IT staff to do.
That instruction from the chatbot showed the agent had “too much information,” Wittenburg said, but after tweaking the city articles it had access to and adding similar content from Microsoft’s knowledge base, things were on a more even keel.
Imperfect data might be a concern for some more risk-averse state and local leaders as they experiment with and roll out AI, especially for public use. But Wittenburg said local leaders must be willing to try, pivot quickly when there are issues and otherwise make sure AI cites its sources for full transparency.
“Your data is never going to be perfect,” he said during the panel discussion. “It’s got to be good enough, and then adjust, adjust quickly, and then use this as an opportunity to correct your data, enhancing reliability and the data source transparency.”
Observers echoed that sentiment and said state and local leaders must be willing to iterate, rather than assume the technology is infallible and will never need tweaking. Slowly ramping up the use of AI can also help build confidence.
“What I tell our customers is, don't turn AI on and step back and say it's going to be perfect,” Chris Dilley, ServiceNow’s chief technology officer for state and local government, said in an interview. “Make sure you're trusting, make sure you're validating, make sure you're looking at it, until you can get to the point of really trusting what you have…I tell our customers, turn that dial down, to not trust it. And then, as you build more confidence in these processes, get hundreds, if not thousands, of things running through there, then you could turn that dial to trust it a little bit more and maybe turn it into full autonomous.”
Wittenburg said much more is ahead, including further upgrading and refining the “Ask Raleigh” self-service portal for residents that launched last year. In time, he said he wants to find a way for the various overlapping governments — city, county and state — to use AI agents to work together more easily and solve problems for residents quicker.
“An example I give is a pothole,” he said in the interview. “You call in, you want the pothole fixed. It could be a city road, a county road or a state road, and they're all very different processes, but you as a community member just want the pothole fixed, so [we’re] hiding the complexities of government from the community to just provide services.”