#342 AI for Cities: Reinventing Public Communication and Resident Engagement

This is where like agentic AI that is intelligence based, knowledge based is so helpful because you can essentially train a really great civic, you know, specific agent that knows how to handle, you know, civic information. It's like new ordinance. I put that new ordinance in and it knows exactly where to do it and how to adjust things and where to adjust things. Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Daren, Chief Enterprise Architect, Educator, Author and most importantly, your host. On this episode AI for Cities, reinventing public communication and resident engagement with Casey Elliott, Entrepreneur and CEO of PennyApp. Casey, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Daren. Thanks for having me. Hey, you know, it was a pleasure talking to you. We met at someone's birthday party and then I got to talking to your wife. Your superpower is your wife, by the way, if you don't know that already. I agree. Man, she, she like, we were talking like, what? Casey's doing this. This is totally awesome. We've got to talk. Then we talked about it a little bit and I said, we have to have you come on the show. I think you got something really cool here. But before we do that, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show and every superhero has a background story, an origin story. So Casey, let's see if you can top some of the others that I've had on here. I've had people on Mount Everest. I've had marathon runners that ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. So can you beat that? What, you know, what's your background story, Casey? Well, I sing, I sing an act. That's, that's a, that's a, those are really, those are pretty good superpowers. I mean, it's not nearly as cool as seven marathons as seven continents. That guy was, that guy was just off his rocker crazy. I'm just going to tell you right now. He had a great story and a great interview, but he, I told him, you're just crazy. He goes, oh, yeah. No, it's, it's so cool actually to get those kind of backstories. I think, like you said, we all have these backstories and it's so interesting. My, my story, like, you know, I, I, I'm a theater kid, like I, in high school, I was super into theater. I went to the Zachary School in Hollywood for a little while. But, you know, as, as I got into college, I started as a musical theater major. And then like about a year in, I was like, you know what, I don't know if I needed a degree in musical theater to like do musical theater. And so I continued to take classes and do the shows at Weber State University is where I went to school. But then I realized like, I, I'm going to, I'm going to try business out. And so I got into business school and, and loved it. Absolutely loved it. Weber State University, Northern Utah. It's like that there was the perfect size, like great community connection to entrepreneurs. I had great mentors. I got involved with, you know, analyzing businesses with a local venture capitalist and, and just kind of like got the entrepreneurial bug. And so I continued to do theater and music and things while also pursuing this career and business. And right out of school, I got a job with a startup company that I had actually consulted with on the venture capital side of things. Saw it as a great opportunity in the ed tech space and started working with them. And then, and then I got an opportunity to go on a Broadway tour. And I thought, gosh, I, I feel like I need to take this because we had one little kid at the time. Yeah, and I'm like, we're, we're never going to be this young again. And my career is just starting. So maybe this is a good chance to do something crazy like this. So I went and I did that. I toured with Iita. I played the lead Rodimé's role in that show. We toured the country for a year, living in hotels. We had a baby. We, you know, we took, we were, we were together like my wife and my kid, like they were on the road with me. And, and this is like, this is, this was a tour where we were like in a different town almost every night, every other night. It was a lot of moving around. But, but it was awesome. You know, like you work at night, you do the show at night, but during the day we, we explored, we went to museums and, and explored whatever town we were in. And so it was, it was a lot of fun. But I came back when you're young though, you can only do that when your kids are small, right? I mean, 100%. Yeah, no, I got four kids. Yeah, it was, it was the right time. Definitely couldn't do that now. At least until our kids are like, God, and you know, out of the house. But yeah, four kids now, they're all teenagers. But anyway, yeah, I got, I got, after that, I got back into business and into the kind of the startup world. And I, I've, I've kind of just balanced the two my whole career. I started a music group called Gentry. It's a tenor trio that, that Darren, you, you were at a house. Oh yeah, that was awesome. Casey, Casey, you should know this about me. And my audience knows I cry at the drop of a hat, especially around music. And when you were seeing it, I was just bawling my head off. So I had to have you come on the show because not very many people, everyone does it to me. So congratulations. You're in a, you're in a very good, Gentry's awesome, by the way, for those that haven't heard. So yeah, thank you. Well, and that's of course where you and I met and where my, my wife, who I guess is a really great sales rep because she, she was talking about, she should be taking a salary there, Casey. I'm just saying. Honestly, she's, she just hears me talk about it nonstop. So she's about as knowledgeable as anybody about it. But yeah, this, you know, I don't, I don't know if you want to get into Penny, but Penny's the thing I've been working on now for three years as a startup in the, in the civic tech space. So I kind of jumped around. Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about Penny specifically because when, when your wife pitched it to me, I said, Hey, this is, this is really cool. And then when we got to talk, I got to get more deep into the technology. I'm a technologist. So I'm like, Hey, this is super cool. And they, the ramifications of this. But I want to talk about the problem space first, which is you're really targeting cities, period. You're not going after, you're going to, and probably small to midsize cities is looks like your sweet spot. Is that right? Well, it's a, it's a communication problem that we're addressing. So this came about just being a resident. Like I've never worked for a city. My partners have never worked for cities, but we are residents and we, we felt the pain of either finding information on a city website or getting information, proactive information from cities, either just up day to day updates or just getting information from cities, or just getting information from cities. So I'm like, day to day updates or like emergency updates. And we all kind of have these stories of like, Oh, this is really frustrating or this emergency happened. I didn't know about it because I didn't get the notification or whatever. And so we, that's the problem we're trying to solve. And as we got in, as we got into it, we realized it's kind of like, it's, it's a two part problem. It's a channel problem and a, and a channel fragmentation problem. And what I mean by that is you have a website, you have social media, you have email you have, and within social media, you have six different platforms and within each platform, you've got 10 different pages and it's just like it's a, it's kind of a mess. It's kind of chaos. And, and these cities are, they have this philosophy of like meeting people where they are, which means we're going to try to post in as many different places as possible. And the problem with that is all the information isn't in one place. It's, it's, it's all over the place. And so if I get my information on Facebook, let's say, that's like where I see city updates, well that you're only seeing a very small part of the picture here. And so if you want more information about XYZ or you have a specific question, it's kind of like, well, where do I go? And then the website is maybe the closest thing that the cities have to a single source of truth, but not everything that's on Facebook is on the website and vice versa. And so it's just this kind of like mess of like, where the heck do I even go to find the information? So that's what we tried to solve is like taking everything, consolidating and standardizing the process of civic communication so that it's not only easier for cities to manage because these small cities, a lot of times they don't even have a dedicated communications person. It's like the city managers doing stuff in the city recorder and the clerk and the secretary. And so simpler for cities and then simpler for residents so that they know like, I have one place I know I can go for everything. I don't have to worry about is this the right place? Is this the right channel? So when you guys kicked this off, did you, you kicked it off three years ago? So we started development, yeah, three years ago, right, like two months before the chat GPT moment. I was gonna say, right, right, right around when chat GPT just kind of blossomed, right? So you had no idea in your mind about AI stuff. How has that I mean, because man, that's huge AI. How did that play a role in where you're headed with the development of the product? Huge, huge, Darren. I mean, just just like everyone else in the tech space is you're sorry, you kind of have to retool everything in a way. And so we, we had been a couple months down the path that we were thinking like, you know, just simplifying posts and updates and push notifications and events and things like that. And then when chat GPT came out, it's like, Oh, now this, this allows us to create a centralized content database so that it's not just the posts and the events, but it's any city question, right? Because if you can have all the official information in one place, then you can use AI as a as a chat layer to then just act to answer questions directly. So rather than the experience being I go to a city website, I click through 14 layers of tabs and six different PDF documents to try to find my answer. I can just ask AI. I could say AI, like give me the building permit form or whatever it might be. And it's like, here it is. Here's the lake. No search required, right? So that, that was the big aha moment. It's like, okay, this, this, this, this unifies everything. It unifies the data, the information for us. So you guys pivoted into more of a content management solution with a distribution, a unique distribution channel, which I think is pretty clever because most of the other people, they're just throwing chatbots on the front of a bunch of stuff. Instead, you guys went full board the other way and you said, Hey, we need a content management system first to give to the city and use the chat as a mechanism to interact with, with the constituents. That's right. Yeah. So you see a lot of cities and a lot of cities are currently just slapping an AI chatbot on top of their existing website, which, you know, it's better than traditional search for sure. The challenge with, I don't think, yeah, I mean, it can hallucinate. It can give you a bunch of garbage that's wrong. I've, I've already seen that in some, some of these sites. For sure. Yeah. It's kind of the garbage in garbage out philosophy, right? Like if the underlying information data you have is, is disorganized, there's duplicates, it's inaccurate. I mean, AI can only do so much as good as, and as smart as it is. And so yeah, it's, it's kind of like figuring out an easier way to keep the, the, the data clean, but then also like making it easier for cities to, to manage the information. So let me give you one scenario that's really common with cities. Let's say like chickens, like how many chickens can I have? Like that's a common, you know, city type question that runs it. Yeah, no, we have that problem in my neighborhood right here. Some lady down the street thinks she can have like 24 chickens. I don't think that's a good idea. Right. Right. So, so what cities do, because residents have this question and it's in the code, the code is like, I mean, that's like, that's kind of the Bible for the city, right? And answers a lot of these questions. The problem is the code is not consumable. And so what cities do is they put it on a webpage on their website and they create a chicken, you know, or animal calculator on their website. And then they have another page over here. It's like, Hey, FYI, this is some information about chickens and it links over here. And then they put a post about it on Facebook. And so it's, it ends up in six different places. This thing about chickens. And so when that, when that thing about chickens has to change, what do they do? They have to go remember, where in the heck have we put this information? Where is it on our website? And so maybe they're keeping spreadsheets of every single page and like, what information? It's a mess. It's really difficult to keep track of. And then you've got all these pages that you're having to manage and create and find cute pictures of chickens and whatever it might be. And so we're like, okay, let's, if we're using AI and we can approach this from more of a knowledge graph standpoint, let's just ingest the information, let AI do the management part of it. Right? It sort of becomes an agentic content manager where you're just feeding it information and new information. And you say, Hey, there's some new information about chickens. Here it is. Now it's, it's updating the underlying infrastructure of that knowledge graph. And now it can just answer the questions, you know, in real time with the most updated information. So that's really interesting because you've decreased the actual amount of data that's required as well. Yeah. Right. Because now I'm only, now I only care about the policy. Right. I don't care about the chicken calculator or, or, you know, the pretty pictures of chicken. The policy is, is the law, right? That's the only thing that needs to go in. Everything else is table stakes because the, the AI is going to generate something that answers the question better for the constituent for the! And it's still always reference, references the official information, right? Because I mean, AI is a summary, a summary of what? Well, in this case, it's a summary of the city's official information. And so we try to make it clear that AI, I mean, as you know, like it's still not 100% perfect and, and it's, it's going to make mistakes from time to time, but, but it always will reference the official information. And so AI continues to get better at answering questions accurately and not hallucinating. But when in doubt, it will always reference that code in most cases, like in this question, because that's the official source of truth. And the other cool thing is when you have just the raw information, the unsexy sort of like, you know, unpublished, raw information, AI is becoming more and more a great publisher, right? Where it's taking information and presenting it in consumable ways. And so now you're not having to pay a full-time person to be a content creator and publisher and, and visualizer of information, right? Creating the graphs and the charts more and more with the multimodal approach to these models, like we can do that. We can present the information in consumable ways. Well, I was just thinking when you were saying that, not just in, you know, different ways, like voice or images or things, also languages. For sure. Think of a city where there's a huge influx of immigrants, like here in Sacramento area, where I live, when, when Biden shut, shut down Afghanistan, the war in Afghanistan, we had a huge influx of Afghani immigrants moving to the area. And there was a big problem with a translation of things into their language. And, and there's actually multiple languages, it turns out, in Afghanistan amongst these immigrants. That was a huge problem because there was a hard way of interacting with them and getting the services that they need with the generative AI that's taken care of, you know, automatically. That's pretty. Exactly. Well, we've showed cities that it kind of blows their mind. We were doing a demo the other day. And of course, you know, we asked a question in Spanish and, or we just, we got a response in English and said, okay, now give it to me in Spanish. And they were like, okay, what about Mandarin? It's like, sure, you know, Mandarin, it gives you the Mandarin characters. And then what somebody's like, can you, can you ask it to give it the response, but put it in poetry form? You know, it's like, sure, you know, it's like, and that, that comes from the LLMs, right? Like we didn't know that. That's just like inherent. His models work with their, their minds were absolutely blown. It's like, you know, this flexibility of, you know, the user becomes now that, like, you can, you can customize the way that the information is delivered. So I mean, that's so powerful when you think about it, because everybody learns differently. You know, like somebody might say, I'm a visual learner. So it's great. Yeah. Make me a chart, make me, make me an infographic of this information or whatever. Let's talk a little bit about the updating of the content, because that's a big deal. I'm, I'm thinking beyond just cities. I know you guys are tired for cities, but I recently, I was talking to an agency. I can't mention their name because I get in trouble when I do, but they have a lot of updates to their policies, especially every time that, anytime that Congress sneezes, they get new policies. Or anytime you get a new president, there's new policies that come in. And the biggest problem they have is these new policies have to be reconciled with the old policies and, and then new directives get sent out. And there's whole teams that that's all they do is I got this new content coming in, this new policy, what policies does it replace? And then what new directives come out of it? Like, or what things am I allowed to do now that I wasn't allowed to do before? And how do I ask it? Those sorts of things, your solution here, I think can handle that, right? You can handle these updates to policies and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not, it's not too dissimilar from what cities deal with because they're, they're always having policy related changes with updated ordinances and your rules and things that passed. And so, yeah, there, and there, there's constantly this reconciliation process that has, has to happen where that with their current code, but also the state code or county code, or, you know, these different like layers of regulation and rules that all has to sort of agree. And so, again, like that, that this is where like agentic AI that is intelligence based knowledge base is so helpful because you can essentially train a really great civic, you know, specific agent that knows how to handle, you know, civic information. It's like new ordinance. I put that new ordinance in and it knows exactly where to do it and how to adjust things and where to adjust things. I mean, arguably better than, than a human does or at a minimum, a lot faster because it just, it kind of just does it and it has a holistic picture of everything. Right. So, so that's a key, that's a key aspect to what you guys have is that's why I like your, when I heard about your solution, I wanted to dig in a little bit more because you're focusing on the content management part. Yeah. The other part with the constituent stuff, that's kind of built in. But like you said at the beginning, if I don't have good data and the data isn't temporally important, right? Then it doesn't, it doesn't provide real value to, to the users like, can I, can I hitch my horse up to, you know, a certain thing probably doesn't apply very, very often anymore. Right. Yeah. Where new things are happening all the time and things like that. How, how has it been received by cities so far? Are they, do they see the vision of this? Do they? Yes. I, I think that once we explain it, once we go through everything, so this, this is usually how the sort of the process goes, the mental process for cities. It's sort of like, okay, what is this? It's a little bit like, I got to wrap my head around this because it's, it's a different way. I, less and less, I'm saying it's a paradigm shift because I don't think it's that big of a paradigm shift. I, I think it's more of just like, cities are thinking, well, can we do this? Like, do we have permission to do this? You know, like, for example, one of the things that, that we tell cities is like, you, you can really consider getting off of social media. You should really consider, you know, stop doing all of the things that you're doing and standardize it into a single, the single channel of communication. And the reason is like, cities do that all the time with different services, you know, whether it's garbage collection or different utilities, right? They, they have to standardize it in the name of efficiency and just the solution that's best for them, the most people. And, and so I think that's like the biggest hurdle for people to get over. But in terms of like the logic of why we're doing it and, and making it easier, like it clicks for cities. And so, yeah, I think cities more and more are just going to be like, I look at this as a, I look at it as a, an evolution of the website, I guess, maybe more specifically, information heavy websites and content management system. So if you have that kind of website, that kind of content, which cities do, like this is a perfect solution because like the only reason that we've created these websites in the way that we have with all the tabs and layers and pages is to try to make the information easier to find and more, more consumable. Right. And now AI has changed that paradigm. And so that's what we're trying to help cities wrap their head around. And frankly, like the, the cost of these civic website and content management solutions is quite a bit more than we feel like it needs to be. And we feel like we can provide a simpler solution. Yeah, you're dealing with derivative work too. Right. These websites are just someone writing something about the policy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In this case, you can get rid of all that content. That content provides just another view into the real content, which is the policies or whatever the regulations or CCNRs, like in my neighborhood, wouldn't be great if I could just ask what color can I really paint my house? Right. That clear. That clear. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Now, my next question I have because I think the city might have this one. You've shown me that this is great for pooling information where I'm a constituent, I go on to a site and ask questions. Great. What about, and you mentioned, what about being notified of emergencies and things like that? They have all these SMS messaging. And I, I know the cities like to push out to social media to kind of drive people into their websites or drive people into like their rec centers and their summer programs and things like that. Aren't you kind of, you know, skirting around that? I mean, you're getting rid of maybe some, some channels of revenue that they have by, by posting on these social media sites. Yeah. So the thing with social media sites that most people don't realize is the organic reach of social media platforms, like take Facebook, for example, is probably the primary one most cities use. The organic reach is 2.6%. So what that means is post something on your page. Yeah. Let's say you have a thousand followers, you post something on your page, 26 people of your thousand followers will see that post on average. These are, these are platform averages. And that's, that's like platform wide. And so government agency pages are actually lower than that because they're, they're inherently not as engaging. Yes. And so like if you, if that, if that's true, if those numbers are accurate, that's awful. That's awful. Yeah. And in our opinion, cities shouldn't even be, be wasting resources in trying to post with that low of reach. And so honestly, what some cities do, they will literally pay for meta ads on their posts to actually reach residents, which again, is insane to us. Like, don't do that. Like, don't pay Facebook to reach your audience. But how do I reach out? But because I, I do need to somehow reach out to not just be there. So what, what strategies do you guys have for reaching out? Or is that outside the scope of what you guys are doing? No, so, so there's, there's a couple things. When you, when you take away the options, people are funneled into one option. This, and this is like, this isn't necessarily an easy answer, but this is really, frankly, the answer. It's, it's kind of like garbage collection. Let's, let's look at garbage collection. So if, if my day is Friday, the garbage is picked up and I just refuse, I hate that day. Like I work, I whatever, whatever. Yeah. And I'm like, you know what, I refuse to take my garbage on a Friday. Guess what's going to happen? My garbage isn't going to get picked up. And if I really want my garbage picked up, I'm going to take it out on Friday. Like that's just the bottom line. No matter how much I don't like it. And so our philosophy is you, you say residents, we're standardizing, we're going to give you an amazing platform. It's easy to use. It's, it's, it's a mobile app. It's a web app. You can access it from anywhere as long as you have a connection, you can access this from anywhere. And we're going to put all of our official information on there. We're going to update you regularly. You're going to get emergency notices on here. Everything's going to be streamlined. Okay. So you do, you do have a push notification where I can say, we do. Okay. So this is kind of cool, right? Because I can say, Hey, I'm interested in any new development in the city. Notify me of any new, new development in the city. Exactly. Exactly. Customize your notifications, only get what you want. Now that's slick. Yeah. And if you, and if you hate mobile apps for whatever reason, you don't like push, like you sign up for a, a, a summary weekly summary email or a monthly summary email that that's automated through the platform. And so it's like, we've given cities the ability to reach residents in a really smart, great user experience kind of way. And, and basically it's like, look, if you want the information here it is. So it's more of a meeting in the middle approach than as a city, we're going to try to reach you wherever you are, wherever your preferences are. That's a losing battle. You're as a city, you're never going to be able to reach everybody that way, because everybody's going to have their preference. Everybody's going to say, I want it this way and I want it this way. And I'm on true social and I'm on X and I'm here. It's like, no, we can't reasonably do that as a city. So what we're giving them is a place that is a really slick place to put everything for residents to access. And so then you ask the question of like, well, you know, how to read residents still have to go in and like opt in basically. And it's like, yeah, if you want information, just like my garbage can, like I got, I got to order the garbage can, right? Like I got to opt in. If I want that service, that communication service, I have to opt in once that happens, you're golden. And so it will take some time to get people to to sign up and opt in and do those things. But but it's not five or six options. It's one. And so our thinking is that it's actually going to be a lot easier to reach a significant number of residents more so than they are now because it's just one option. I really I really like that. That one option thing. And you're right. I actually think it will actually improve constituents being involved in their community more. We have an app around here. That's a click a click and fix it app. Right. So if one of our neighbors has a camper out front in front of their house for you know, weeks on end, we can just take a photo, send it and it takes care of itself. We don't even know. I called the Gladys app because it Gladys was that nosy neighbor on a bewitched. And she was always looking, you know, so my wife thinks it's hilarious because I always say, hey, pull out the Gladys app. These people got a boat parked in the middle of the street, you know, for the last week. So I think people do want to be involved in their communities and they do want to interact. So I think you guys are on the right track here. I think it's pretty clever and a clever use of AI and instead of, hey, just just a front end app, you know, just a chat bot on what you already have. No, so pretty sweet. Casey, you know, the next phase of this there and like there's so many exciting things you can do with this because if you have all the centralized information of the city, then you can use it use AI to help them become even better communicators because anybody who who communicates regularly like on a daily basis, you kind of have this like like block like what am I going to communicate today? Like what am I going to pose? What am I going to share? What's worthwhile? What should residents know about? And let's say a meeting happened last night, we pull in the transcript from the recording, we got all the context and everything. Now the next morning, the city communicator when they log into penny, like we can offer them like, Hey, here are five things you should consider sharing with your residents based on last night's meeting. You know, so because you see a lot of cities posting about like the secretary's birthday and you know, the the dog, the new dog at the fire station, like, great, that's great. But also like, you probably not going to really engage your residents that way. But if you give them an update on the development that's going in down the street and you're asking now for feedback on which grocery store that you think that should go in there, like, Okay, that's gonna, that's probably gonna be interesting to a lot of people. So just how it'll help them become better communicators. No, I like I like this approach a lot. So Casey, if someone wants to learn more about penny and and all that, where do they go? Where they go to find out more? Any app? So PENY penny is it comes from the penny press newspapers of the early 1800s play play on that one of the first forms of mass communication. So we dropped an end. So it's just one end penny, penny app.com is our website, you can you can check out, you know, more information there and and reach out if you don't want to see a demo or get more information about it. That's that's awesome, Casey. You know, I can't wait to see how the company goes. So we'll have to have you come back on the show to see, you know, if it's morphed a little bit or if you're expanding, I always like that talking to startups because there's so much passion and excitement. And I think you guys have something really cool here. So congratulations. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Darren. Appreciate that. Thanks for listening to embracing digital transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. 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