AI Agents Are Coming To Knock On The Door Of City Hall
February 2, 2025
0
AI Agents are going to play an increasingly important role in how cities function and how residents … [+] interact with their local government. getty Despite notable improvements
AI Agents are going to play an increasingly important role in how cities function and how residents … [+] interact with their local government.
getty
Despite notable improvements in digitalization over the past decade, in most cities it’s still clunky for constituents, businesses, and visitors to engage in even the most basic government services online. Sure, in smart cities like Singapore, Baku, and Dubai, most municipal services are streamlined and digital, but they remain the aspiration.
In reality, a community member in a typical US city often has to complete paper forms or fill in online PDFs, and where services are digital, they are inconsistent and still require far too many complex steps. The digital transformation of local government is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity still waiting to be fully realized. Might artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically AI agents, finally provide the leg up cities need?
Cities Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI)
It won’t come as a surprise that AI is beginning to find a welcome home in city halls across the world just as it has in every other industry. According to the Hoover Institution, already 1 in 4 government employees regularly use generative AI for their work. That usage level will grow quickly over the next few months following similar trends in the private sector.
AI is finding its way into every aspect of city operations including public safety, planning, transportation, and citizen services. The most popular uses include task automation, support for decision-making, and engagement with the community.
City leaders are recognizing the broader opportunity with AI and are largely embracing it. That said, they currently face significant challenges from their own bureaucracies, regulations, and lack of technical expertise, to risks such as privacy and hallucinations that don’t have a resolution yet. Most limitations, however, are temporary and soon city leaders and providers will find greater ease and more demand for implementing AI-powered solutions.
AI Agents Arrive On The Scene
Perhaps the emerging AI technology that promises the most radical shift in how people experience their local government will be through the deployment of AI agents. An AI agent is a system that acts independently to process information and then take steps to achieve specific objectives. Rather than a person providing AI with the exact actions required to get something done, the promise of an AI agent is that it can determine the optimal steps and then go about getting them done.
OpenAI’s new solution, Operator, is an example of a generalized AI agent. Ask it to find your preferred seats for an upcoming concert and make the booking on your behalf and off it goes.
This, of course, is just a simple tease at what will be possible in the near future when, for example, AI agents coupled with robots will autonomously carry out the entirety of complex assignments.
Transforming The Government Experience
It’s still early for AI agents in the private sector and even earlier for them in public agencies. However, one solution, SuperCity AI, provides an early glimpse at what is coming soon to our cities.
SuperCity is an app that is rethinking how AI can be used to provide a better experience in how residents engage with their city in areas such as finding information, paying bills, and reporting an issue.
Apps that play in this space are already numerous, from SeeClickFix to Nextdoor, and many attempts have been made to hit the sweet spot of convenience and stickiness.
Cities often provide their own solution in addition to competing with offerings from the private sector. The proliferation of community engagement apps for a single city alone creates confusion when people don’t know what to use for a given service, but more broadly, these apps with few exceptions have failed to meet expectations.
The team behind SuperCity come with significant government and technology credentials. Miguel Gamiño Jr., no stranger to city management having served previously as the head of technology in the cities of El Paso, San Francisco, and New York, has joined forces with his two partners, David Lara, formerly the Chief Administrative Officer at New York City Hall, and Niko Dubovsky, who’s worked in the startup world for several years.
The team’s passion for public service together with a deep understanding of how cities work are assets that they are bringing to building this solution. This coupled with state-of-the-art AI adoption doesn’t guarantee their success but certainly provides them with some early advantages.
The SuperCity founding team. From Left to Right: Niko Dubovsky, Miguel Gamiño Jr., David Lara.
SuperCity
Their mission with SuperCity is to provide a secure and private digital one-stop-shop for residents and to use AI to reduce different elements of friction between the user, the app, and city hall. That friction ranges from residents who are overwhelmed with unnecessary notifications to the complexity of supporting the required interfaces with agency systems. For example, rather than the city being required to manage the complex integration of accepting payments from the app for say, a parking ticket, SuperCity uses AI to meet city requirements and then seamlessly log in and submit the payment.
Removing the complexity for both the user and the city also means that this single app can be used in different cities without requiring the user to download a new app with an entirely different process.
While most apps require the user to locate the feature they need, SuperCity will soon present itself as a conversational bot. A resident will simply discuss what they need and the app will use AI agents to carry out as much of the need with little, if any, user engagement.
Conversational bots are already one of the most popular uses of AI across industries in the area of customer service. Could they also be the future interface for most city interactions too?
The Urgent Future Of AI In Cities
As impressive as the last two years have been, cities are trailing the private sector by a large margin in moving from experimentation to adoption of AI across their functions.
From time to time, a new technology arrives that has the power to radically upset the status quo in a positive way. AI for cities provides perhaps a once in a lifetime shift that will alter what cities do and how they function. City leaders need to increase the urgency of their AI efforts and ensure they are allocating appropriate resources and skills.
In the short-term there are opportunities to have AI augment and improve current operations from community-facing services to data-driven decision-making. Longer term, AI agents will complete entire city services with little or no human interaction on the backend. It’s possible too, that sooner than later, AI will usher in an era without the need for websites and apps.
As the SuperCity app demonstrates, AI and AI agents coupled with novel ideas offer city leaders a whole new toolkit full of possibilities. The time to define an AI future for cities is now.