Ep. 15 - How AI is Revolutionizing Resident Access to City Services

People don't say, okay, I'm on a government website or a city website, I'm going to turn on my city government website brain. They still think in terms of, I'm on Amazon, I'm on Perplexity, I'm on Google, they have expectations for really, really seamless experiences that are now more and more driven by AI and generative AI summaries and things like that. Let's get people as far to finding their answers as we can, but also recognize that there's some things that AI can't do. For us in the government space, it's about finding where those boundaries are and making the 90, 95 percent of the experience that is automated or that is intelligent via AI really, really great. So, it's part of learning and keeping up with expectations, I would say. This podcast is for city communications teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows, and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Government Video Podcast. I'm Michelle Alimoradi and we are here live in Minneapolis this week at the Cablecast headquarters to talk about AI. We've talked about AI before on the podcast, but we're taking a different angle today. Today I'm joined by Nick Wassenberg, who is the CEO of Cludo and they provide AI site search solutions for cities. And they have a goal to better connect residents to city services through AI search. So glad to have you on the podcast today, Nick. Yeah, great to be here. Yeah, I'm glad you could walk a few doors over to our office here in Minneapolis. It's great Always great to have one of our neighbors on the show. Tell us a little bit more about Cludo. How long have you guys been around? What problems are you guys solving? Yeah, let's hear it. For sure. We're actually based, originated in Copenhagen, Denmark about 10 years ago now. So we're, we've been in this space a while. The origin story is fairly straightforward. We saw the founders saw that there was a need for big content websites to have a better way to connect the website visitors to the things that they needed. So we work with a lot of government. Out of city government, county government, and in some other categories too, where just, there's a ton of content constantly being updated on the site and a need for the audience to connect with those. So we do that for about 700 customers around the world. So it's really fun to see what Finland is doing versus what we're doing here in the States and so on. That's us, our technology has really been I think intelligent from the start very beginning, early days, we had machine learning as a part of making the results really relevant and trying to connect. All of the continuously evolving content to what was new today. So somebody wasn't seeing a blog post from six years ago when they really wanted to hear about an event that's happening tomorrow. That's part of our story. More recently, we've added some AI layers, which we can talk about too, on the generative side. So there's, it's an evolving space. So we're trying to keep up with our customers really. That's awesome. And one of the things I love about just talking about these local government problems that we're trying to solve is that these are all things that like us as residents of some city have experienced with and will benefit from. So it's like, it's not this like niche thing. We all deal with this. We all have these frustrations and we're like, how can we solve this problem for me too? So like as you were as you were mentioning some of those things like the blog post when you want to hear about something Tomorrow i'm like, yes, I please solve that problem I love that and you know, Here on the Cablecast team, we are also working with AI, exploring how AI can enhance the value of video content that is, that the city provides and you're working with websites. And so I just really wanted to take this opportunity to talk about where those problems intersect, like where we're trying to solve some of the same problems, but just for different kinds of content. And Just happy that we could, come here and discuss this cause it's such a hot topic and I feel like people are really curious about it. And a lot of people really don't quite understand unless they work with it every day, how sophisticated we are at this point with AI and the ways that it's actually really good. At some things and just really not there yet on other things. So let's get into that. My first question is how can AI powered search tools help residents find information faster? Yeah. You kind of gave an example of that. Yeah. I think, one of the things at a high level that I think about a lot is people don't say, okay, I'm on a government website or a city website. I'm going to turn on my city government website brain. They still think in terms of, I'm on Amazon, I'm on Perplexity, I'm on Google, they have expectations for really, really seamless experiences that are now more and more driven by AI and generative AI summaries and things like that. So I think that's one thing that we keep in mind is the experience, expectations will continue to go up. And I think as we look at what our customers are talking about in the government space, they're trying to keep up with that. And they're trying to make sure that they're tapping into what the new expectations are. And so I think there's some core things that are always going to be true with government. There's always going to be diverse audiences. There's going to be people that are small business owners or new residents, or people that have lived in a community for 50 years or more. So it's always going to be a varied set of audiences coming to the site, which also reflects a varying set of technical aptitude and ability to find things. So when it comes to AI, one thing that we're working with our customers on is let's get people as far to finding their answers as we can, but also recognize that there's some things that AI can't do. So for us, that means with insight search on a website, 90 percent of the questions can probably be answered that somebody is going to have. I need, I'm building a garage in my backyard. I need electrical permits. I need permits for building, show me where those are and walk me through what that looks like. And nowadays, I think the expectation is, summarize the steps that I need to take, rather than just a list of links, tell me the story and give me, some prompts that will help me understand what's related to the things that I'm doing. So yeah, instant, relevant, accurate answers, as well as a richer experience is I think what people are starting to expect, and there's going to be times where I need to talk to somebody. And so we want to punch people out to a call center or an email or something where there's a more personal touch and recognize that that's probably always going to be the case too. So it's about for us in the government space, it's about finding where those boundaries are and making the 90, 95 percent of the experience that is automated or that is intelligent via AI really, really great. So, it's part of learning and keeping up with expectations, I would say. Yeah, I think it's an important thing to bring up this expectation that these other corporate services that people interact with on a day to day have set because when I'm hearing you say that, I'm thinking about If I can't find something fast, my patience is short, right? Like I'm used to being able to turn things up quickly online. And if that's not the case, I might think that it just doesn't exist. And I think that can be a huge problem for cities because then they have all these services that. People are paying for and they don't know they exist and so now the just there's like a satisfaction issue, right? Like they don't think that their government is providing the things that they're asking for that they're paying for. Right. In government in particular, there's also an internal audience so to speak. I was at a trade show specifically for government communicators just a couple weeks ago, and one of the things that somebody told me that was kind of fascinating was, they had gotten a text message from the mayor of the town the night before because something wasn't clearly stated on the website that the mayor couldn't find something. Oh wow. So that's the nightmarish kind of situation where you don't want that. That's a PR nightmare. I know. But the internal audience in government is important too and catering to that and again, it's like unlocking that the most painful thing is when you know something is there and you just can't put your finger on it and there's no way to provide feedback easily. It just becomes a black hole. And so the person managing the website is really stuck with a lack of information. They know that things could be better, but they can't sometimes point to where the need actually is and how to fix it. I can think of so many times where I've heard on like Facebook or some news post where like something passed, you know, there's some new regulation or some new service. And they didn't provide a link or anything for extra information. So you're trying to find it yourself. You have no idea what it's called. Like, And now you're just like on this wild goose chase trying to find it. And a lot of times I don't ever turn up anything. So I would hope that these AI tools could help us with that. I think the other piece that we've seen that is actually really timely The impact of COVID on seeking information and things like wildfires, like these small communities, cities, and townships need to be resources for their residents in case of emergency and in case of pandemics and in case of other events that are maybe less like traumatic, but still need to have accuracy in that moment for people. So I think the need for government to play that role and government websites to play that role to really connect residents when the time is super acute, I think that's, it's here to stay. And it's also a part of why the Cludo team gets so like passionate about helping these customers too. Yeah. So we've been talking about the way that AI can help cities serve residents faster with their digital resources and why that's important. But we were also coming into a really great segue for my next question, which is talking about just the difference in the way people are interacting with those digital resources, right? So is there like a significant change in the way people are going to actually have an interaction with the website or other digital public resources? Like you mentioned before, maybe asking for a summary of steps, you know, instead of just plugging in a couple of keywords and just taking whatever you get, having to read a blog post, having to read an infographic, I don't know. What are you seeing in terms of like differences in the actual interaction? Yeah, I think we think about it in two layers and this is from what we see from our customers. One is the actual, like the experience layer. So we can see on any given website, who's using the navigation versus who's using the site search. We also have a chat function so we can see the breakdown of where people are going and help our customers see that too. So it's like, is anyone even using this chat bot or do they have this kind of predisposed, they've been burned by chat bots before that lead them in circles. And we've all probably had, we've probably all had that experience. Yeah. So do people even try it or do they just typically, do they go a different way? So we're able to feed some of that insight. I think it really varies by the, community and by the site, but what we've seen on average, I would say 25 percent of people when they're searching, 25 percent are using a chat feature versus the remaining 75 percent are still gravitating to the search bar that has a magnifying glass that we're all fairly familiar with. So that's an experienced behavior that I think we've seen a trend in that direction too. People are more apt to see something that looks like the OpenAI chat GPT experience and gravitate towards that because they can trust it a little bit more. That's in evolving space, of course. And then on the, what they're actually searching for and what they expect to find peace, that's part of the insight that we try and provide to our customers. We have reporting on what searches on their site are trending. So if something is showing up as there's a, there's all of a sudden a series of searches for jobs, oftentimes what will happen is, a community may hold a job fair and they want to promote that so they'll do what effectively is a banner ad. Somebody searches for accounting job, you may want to point them to the job fair, because they can see more and have a way to engage with that in a different way. That's really interesting because I didn't think about the way that there's like the reciprocal benefit for the city as well with those insights So that's really cool do you guys ever conduct like satisfaction surveys for your customers? We have a little bit of that. We're most focused on making the search results really great. And so we have a feedback mechanism within a little thumbs up, thumbs down for, was this result relevant? That's something that like end users of the city website are presented with. Okay. Yeah, exactly. And of course as we talk to our customers, we're doing, are they satisfied with Cludo? Our direct, the website owners need to be a big Cludo fans too. So we're certainly taking in that feedback too. As we all want, we all want to know, like, we all want to make sure that we're doing the right, solving the right problems. Hi, Michelle here. We hope you're enjoying this episode of the Government Video Podcast I'm taking a short break from today's discussion to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by Cablecast Community Media. We're a cross platform video solution from Tightrope Media Systems. And despite our name, we help cities, towns, and other local media organizations get their video to viewers on all digital platforms, including cable. If your organization operates a cable channel, um, but we help you reach residents whenever and wherever they watch. Be it on your city's website, on mobile streaming apps, on over the top platforms like Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, or even on their mobile phone. And we even help you push your content live to social media. We've been helping small non commercial stations launch professional, affordable, and efficient video initiatives for over 25 years. And our customers love us because we have great customer support and we have fierce industry loyalty. So if your organization is in need of cross platform video automation and delivery for local coverage of city council meetings or other local events, reach out to our team and schedule a demo today. And if you do, be sure to mention that you heard about it here on the Government Video Podcast to receive a special discount. That's all for me for right now. Back to the episode. Can AI improve government transparency for citizens? And if so, how? Yeah, I think, yes. At the heart of it what we're seeing in government is, Super short or super cramped resources. Like it back to the mayor texting someone in the middle of the night. Obviously that doesn't represent a big team of people that are like a collection of folks working on things. There are governments that are larger that have that, but the people that we talk to very, very, nobody has enough resources, everyone's resource constrained. Yeah. And so I think part of what the gains of AI represent are a way for people to get the core, maybe more monotonous pieces of their job done to then summarize and be more open with what's happening. I think analyzing the effectiveness of programming is something that we talk about quite a bit, meaning if you have a community outreach program, analyzing the results of that, what that looks like, how people engage with the website is part of that overall broader experience. So we'd want to see, as an example, you have a community outreach program for a food shelf or something. You may want to see, are people going on the website and then searching for that? How can I donate? What like, donate to the food shelf? That kind of thing. So, having transparency with that, then the government website owner has the ability to see, is this program effective in terms of gathering donations for that food shelf, for example, so the transparency is coming from insights that tell you whether or not you need to optimize something in order for people to find it. I think so. And also just keeping in mind that, But if I go on, I live in Hennepin County here in Minnesota. If I go on Hennepin County's site and I'm looking for a building permit or I'm looking for some event or something, whatever I'm looking for, and I don't find it via their site search, which they don't use Cludo by the way, if I don't find it what am I going to do? I'm not going to like email somebody and say, excuse me, your site search didn't lead me to what I wanted to find. Could you please improve it? I'm just going to go find it some other way. Yeah. So if you're not seeing that feedback loop, it leads to gaps of information. Okay. And it leads to not being able to provide the transparency that people may be looking for. And then you're going to grumble about it later. Absolutely. And probably be less likely to go engage with that digital experience next time. These county folks aren't doing anything for them. Yeah. So we talked about transparency. What about accessibility? Yeah. Do you think that AI has the potential to increase accessibility for residents trying to interact with city resources? Yeah. Cludo as a company has a sister origin story with another accessibility software company also based in Denmark. So we, our founding team and some of the roots of the team here at Cludo have very close ties to accessibility and in particular accessibility with government. So it's something that's very much on our mind. I think that's why we've added things like voice search. That's a big, when people want something that's accessible, people can search by clicking on the microphone and searching that way. That's one specific kind of feature example, but it is something that we're certainly focused on. I think it's, it's just super important. It's the people that may have accessibility issues that are going to be most likely to need to find information in a way that's seamless and in a way that's really meaningful. So, It is something that we've invested a ton in and I think it is part of the story of how to make these digital experiences like websites and other portals more accessible is provide multiple ways of getting to the answer, right? So that is certainly something that we see and we get almost every government person that we talk to, that's very top of mind. So that means it's top of mind for us too. Yeah. And it enables people to make their inquiry in their own way. And there's some sort of catch all to translate that, right? Like, Oh, we've heard these many different ways of trying to get to this information. So now we can get to that faster. Totally. And there's cases where somebody might be searching for some accessibility topic that they can't find anywhere else on the site, but they're searching for it. And maybe there's nothing there. Our customers then are able to see that too. So if it's, if it is an accessibility topic that people are trying to find information on and it doesn't exist, we're able to then feed that back to the website owner and create some content around it. So essentially what we've been talking about, it's kind of a personalized government city services experience, right? So it sounds like that's the way of the future. That's the way that we're going. Are there any concerns about biases in AI algorithms the government communications team should be concerned about as they adopt these tools and move forward. What are we watching out for? Yeah, I think I mean it's real for everybody. Yeah, I log on to any, I won't name names, but if I log on to any kind of thing that is helping me access information, as a user, I should be on the lookout for whether this is, has some ingrained bias and still have your human brain turned out, right? Yeah. And, and, And what's my search for truth? So that's, a, maybe a bigger topic, but I think in the government space, I think it is, it is something that our customers and the people we talk to are thinking through and it becomes, in a way, it becomes a build versus buy situation where if I. At a very basic level, if I wanted to create my own LLMs and I wanted to create my entire system from scratch, I could obviously invest in that. Let's break down what LLMs are. Large language model. Yeah. Basically what I'm saying is if I wanted to create my own, if I wanted to make a open AI equivalent, that would be an enormous investment, but I could also make sure that the biases were not out of whack, right? So the moment you use other tools that you didn't build yourself. You have to be on the lookout for are there biases in there. We deal with that a lot in our industry. Yeah. Yeah so, but again back to our, our discussion point earlier, it's not as if city and county governments have enormous budgets to do innovative AI things that then they can apply. So they have, I think that there, there's a need to maximize the budgets they have. And often, oftentimes that means investing in tools rather than building tools themselves. It's just something to be on the lookout for. We're certainly focused primarily in what our customers are focused on is, can we measure the impact of someone on our website or engaging with some of our programming, seeking information? Can they find it? And with that in mind, like that, if that, if we retain that as our goal, then the rest is in the hands of the content creators and in the hands of the visitor to the website to evaluate on their own, whether they're finding what they need. And are you monitoring um, the quality of responses, so to speak, that your tools are, are giving people. Yeah. We call it ineffective searches. So if somebody searches for something and they don't find it, we flag that and we provide a recommended path to fix it. It's very much in line with our main mission of provide relevant, accurate, timely answers. Are there any specific steps you take like for city websites that are different than maybe other industries? Yeah. Cities are not. It's not as if a city needs to sell a product in order to survive. I think Hennepin County or any city or government will always have some sort of web presence. It's an expectation, of course, nowadays. So they won't go out of business, but the experience could get worse and worse if they're not focused on investing in it. So it's a different dynamic than somebody that has a transaction on their website, for sure. So a different set of things that we're tracking in terms of the return on that investment or the return on the effort to make the experience really good. So that's a little bit different. But I think I'm always impressed by city and small government folks in terms of how they think about like making the experience really great in making an innovating, actually, we heard that quite a bit from our customers and part of what keeps us on our toes is the ability for people to really think through, Oh, I've got all this content. I want to provide something that actually is a delightful experience on a city or county website, which is it's innovative thinking. And I think it is, it's magical to see people really get engaged with that and say, I don't want to just provide a city website that looks like everything else the bare minimum. Yeah. Yeah, I want to actually provide something that's delightful So it's cool to see that and I think a lot these cities are figuring that piece out for themselves oftentimes and in trying to keep up with those expectations like we talked about. I have one last question for you because we're always curious about this on this podcast and my co host Dana and I did an episode on this recently we talk about how folks in government, because from city to city, you're always dealing with different staff members, different roles, job titles, org structures or I should say department structures. We always are curious to know who are the stakeholders that come into these decisions that, that actually work with the tools and monitor what success looks like. Who are you working with when you're helping a city implement Cludo on their website? Who are you talking to and who's actually the person like touching it, or does it even need to be. monitored at all after you install it? No, yeah. It's definitely something that is curated, I would say, and monitored over time. And it's important to get that right. Cause the information is always changing. We have a few select customers that I think we obviously appreciate and all of our customers, but there are a few most recent that are, I have some recency bias around recent conversations, but if I look at Chesterfield in Virginia, Chesterfield. gov, an amazing experience, an amazing team there. There's also Raleigh, North Carolina, Boulder, Colorado, a few sites like that where they're really doing some special things in terms of how they're managing their site. I gotta give a shout out to Larimer County in Colorado too. So there's a few examples there where the sites are really innovative and the experience is really tied to that. Again, that goal of providing a seamless path to the answer. Within those, who was spearheading within those organizations, there's almost always two players, really. There's a kind of communications or marketing player that is somewhat visionary, and then there's the practical IT players that are digging into that too. Levels, exact roles really varies quite a bit. Um, As probably all your listeners know, but for us, it is a mix of communications and technology that come together. And if those two people are on the same page, they can align on things like budgets, they can align on priorities and they can align on what the real core mission of the site is when we have that, and when we talk to groups that have that alignment, sometimes it's one person, by the way sometimes there's that magical unicorn person that is actually thinks in terms of communication and targets that, but also has a technical background that can build that and implement well. It's a mix of those two functions typically and what I think we see is, there is a blend of people that look outside of government, to the cutting edge. And then they bring that back to government. And don't settle for something that's less than awesome on their own websites. That's the kind of, that's the archetype that we tend to run into and we learn a lot from. So I don't know if that fully answers it. I wish I, I literally wish I had a profile of the exact job titles and where these people hung out where we're working on that and we love to contribute to those communities, but it's a mix for sure. Yeah. We like to bring it up just because we're always encouraging people to be proactive and develop these relationships ahead of time before there's like the project they want to spearhead. You know what I mean? Just like always the communication with these people, have a relationship. Understand what you might be able to pursue if you maintain a good relationship and seek to break down the silos that can often happen in government. Thank you so much, Nick, for coming on to the podcast. Nick Wassenberg is the CEO of Cludo and also our neighbor here in Minneapolis, and we look forward to possibly having you on again in the future. There's so many topics around AI and we are, we're going to bring them to our listeners here Awesome. They come up. And I thanks everyone for listening.