In Palm Beach, Fla. — the longtime winter beach playground for the rich, the home of Mar-a-Lago — officials are turning to artificial intelligence for such tasks, an effort that offers lessons for other municipalities as they make similar moves.
The technology comes from Polimorphic.
The up-and-coming supplier of constituent relationship management software for local governments has raised more than $9 million since its founding in 2019. That includes a $5.6 million seed funding round just more than a year ago.
In September, Palm Beach, via the company’s technology, launched a search tool based on artificial intelligence for the city’s website, Jess Savidge, Palm Beach’s administrative manager, told Government Technology via an email interview.
People who use the site can use full sentences to get answers to specific questions and receive quick responses based on the website content. The new system improves upon the older keyword-based search feature, according to the company. That original search feature remains.
The new tool debuted in Palm Beach around Labor Day after “comprehensive testing and website content review during the summer months produced a consistent testing percentage above 90 percent,” according to Savidge — an illustration of how much work comes before deployment.
“Clear and current website content is essential,” she said. “During our testing, we discovered that sometimes you can discover conflicting, unclear or outdated and incomplete content. We continue to review our content through the lens of ‘teaching Poli’ so Poli can deliver fast and factual information.”
Some of the most common inquiries made via the tool: how to pay for a parking ticket, how to get a resident parking decal, when construction is allowed, when the bridges are open — the city borders an intracoastal waterway — and how to make a public records request.
A recent tropical storm, Hurricane Milton, also offered a chance to improve the search technology.
While Milton did not directly hit Palm Beach, “it provided an opportunity for us to discover that we need to refresh the content to ensure that AI knows there is new content to use as a resource,” Savidge said. “Moving forward, we will manually ‘scrape’ the emergency service content so that Poli has the most recent content to provide for our community.”
The continued success of the tool will rely on several factors, she said, including a feedback mechanism that can lead to more precise answers, and more analytics.
