AI tools can also help governments understand the needs and desires of residents. The community “already has many of its knowledge” through community meetings, public inquiries, 311 tickets and other channels, says Williams. Boston, for example, recorded Nearly 300,000 311 requests in 2024 (most were parking -related complaints). New York City recorded 35 million 311 Contacts in 2023. It can be difficult for civil servants to identify trends in all this noise. “Now they have a more structured way to analyze these data which did not really exist before,” she said.
AI can help paint a clearer image of how these types of resident complaints are geographically distributed. During a community meeting in Boston last year, city staff used a generative AI to instantly produce a map of poule complaints of the previous month.
The AI also has the potential to enlighten more abstract data on the desires of residents. A mechanism that Williams quotes in his research is polite, an open source survey platform used by several national governments All over the world and a handful of media cities and societies in the United States. A recent update allows guests to categorize and summarize the responses using AI. It is an experience in the way AI can help facilitate direct democracy – a problem that the CRO tool creator worked with Openai and Anthropic.
But even if Megill explores these borders, he proceeds cautiously. The objective is “to improve the human agency”, he says, and to avoid “manipulation” at all costs: “You want to give the model very specific and discreet tasks that increase human authors but do not replace them.”
Another concern is disinformation because local governments discover the best way to work with AI. Although they are increasingly common, 311 chatbots have a mixed record on this front. New York Chatbot makes securities Last year to provide inaccurate and sometimes bizarre information. When a journalist by Associated Press asked if it was legal for a restaurant to serve cheese that had been nibbled by a rat, the chatbot replied: “Yes, you can still serve cheese to customers if it has rat bites.” (New York chatbot seems to have improved since then.