Client story The City of Carson, CA, leads the way: transforming government with AI for citizen engagement

Business challenge

The City of Carson’s Information Technology and Security Department has a mission to offer a secure and modern IT infrastructure that delivers an exceptional user experience to staff, residents, and businesses. A key part of this mission is to close the digital divide for vulnerable communities, facilitate multi-generational community engagement by giving easy access to information, and establish strategic plans for AI innovation and AI governance.

The city’s current communication methods needed to keep pace with this vision by improving their call routing system. With a minimally staffed front desk answering a high volume of calls, this could lead to multiple call transfers, extended hold times, and a suboptimal experience for residents. 

“A large percentage of these calls are just requests for basic information,” says Gary Carter, Director of Information Technology and Security at the City of Carson. “Sometimes, it involves two or three transfers to get to the right person. We came to realize that an automated process would provide a better user experience for these requests.”

Serving a multi-generational population 

The challenge was compounded by the city’s multi-generational population. Many residents are seniors who can use the city’s website but prefer a quick, conversational way to get information. Simultaneously, the city wanted to ensure youth and teens are also engaged and can easily find information about programs and events on their mobile devices. The city needed a solution that could serve all demographics and quickly disseminate information, especially during emergencies.

Looking ahead, the city also recognized the need to prepare for two major global events: the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028, both of which will bring hundreds of thousands of international visitors to the area. This presented a significant challenge for providing multilingual support. Previously, this required identifying an available city staffer who spoke the right language to take a call. The city needed a proactive solution to handle this anticipated spike in inquiries without a massive increase in call center staff.

Solution

To address these challenges, the City of Carson collaborated with SADA, An Insight company, and multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, to implement a conversational AI solution. The core of the solution was a virtual agent built using Google Cloud Conversational Agents/Dialogflow CX (Contact Center AI Platform), a comprehensive platform for building, deploying, and managing conversational AI. The project, named Ask Carson, was designed to deliver a chatbot that could offer quick, accurate, and multi-generational community engagement.

SADA played a critical role throughout the process, from the initial proof of concept to post-launch support. “The SADA team was a huge help with the design of the conversation flow and the training and testing of the bot,” says Bing Jing, Web Developer at the City of Carson. “The team used a structured approach to repeatedly test and train the chatbot to improve its conversational flow and ensure it could handle a variety of inquiries.”

Creating a conversation flow for multilingual requests

A key feature of the implementation was the creation of a separate language flow to handle multilingual requests. This was a crucial step in preparing for the World Cup and the Olympics. The solution was designed to automatically translate and answer questions in the user’s language, whether they explicitly requested it or simply started typing in another language. This eliminated the need for a live agent to translate.

SADA also helped the city leverage their existing public website content as a data source for the chatbot. They guided the city in using Google Cloud Vertex AI Data Store agents to automatically pull information from the website and use it to answer questions, ensuring the chatbot’s knowledge base is always up-to-date.

The project was a rapid deployment, with a final solution delivered in just nine weeks. SADA project management and comprehensive documentation were instrumental in this success. “SADA kept the project on schedule and patiently walked the Carson team through the development process,” says Jamila Haji, Senior IT Project Support Analyst at the City of Carson. 

Throughout the project, SADA fully documented the solution, starting with Google Cloud knowledge base links before the implementation, to delivering the final customized documentation one month before the project wrap-up. In between regularly scheduled status meetings, the city was able to get questions answered, even during nights and weekends.

“SADA’s technical documentation and their continuous availability were highly valued,” says Jing. “Whenever I would ask a question on chat, I would get an answer right away. SADA is very good at answering questions after hours and on Saturday and Sunday.”

Impact

As a result of the chatbot collaboration with SADA, the City of Carson has experienced an immediate and measurable impact on their operations and the citizen experience.

Quantifiable benefits

• Reduced live agent calls: Post-launch, the chatbot has averaged nearly 400 conversation sessions per month with zero live agent handoffs. This directly translates to 400 calls a month that no longer require a human agent, allowing staff to focus on more complex inquiries.
• 24/7 self-service: The chatbot offers continuous support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with approximately 27% of its usage occurring after business hours. This has eliminated the need for staff overtime to handle weekend and nighttime inquiries and for contractors to manage dedicated project phone lines.
• Faster response times: By automating answers to basic questions, the chatbot has eliminated the two to three transfers that were previously common for simple inquiries, creating a seamless experience for residents.

Qualitative improvements

• Improved citizen engagement: The chatbot, Ask Carson, is a modern, user-friendly way for all residents, including seniors and youth, to get information. Easily answering questions about events, permits, and public works projects, it has enhanced the quality of human interactions with city staff. “Residents are now asking informed questions of city staff rather than just simply gathering information,” says Carter. “Instead of asking about when their street is getting repaved, they’re asking about what type of asphalt will be used.” 
• Enhanced staff productivity: The chatbot allows the city’s front desk staff to focus on more value-added functions. Ask Carson will free up an estimated 30% of staff time within a year to improve workflow efficiency, conduct continuous testing of the chatbot, and assist with content updates.
• Internal process optimization: The chatbot’s analytics give insights into the most frequently asked questions, doubling as an alert for when a content update is needed on the city’s website. This helps ensure the information given to the public is accurate and current.
• Foundation for AI strategy: The project served as the city’s first-ever AI deployment, which yielded crucial insights that are now informing the city’s broader AI governance and strategic plan.

Future outlook

The City of Carson is poised for continued innovation and growth, with the chatbot serving as a scalable and flexible foundation for the future. The team plans to integrate the chatbot with other systems, such as a new call management system, and possibly a document management solution. The ultimate goal is for the chatbot to serve as a front-end interface for publicly accessible documents, further improving self-service options.

The project has laid the groundwork for handling the expected spikes in demand during the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028. The multilingual capabilities of the chatbot will be a major asset, allowing the city to serve visitors from around the world.

“SADA’s flexibility, customer service, and AI expertise helped the city avoid many adverse impacts that have happened to other agencies,” says Carter.