LLM on a Budget: How Small Cities Are Leveraging AI

There’s a new staff member fielding questions about economic development in a small city on the Kentucky-Ohio border: a green alien named Clive.

The chatbot, launched in early November on the Covington, Ky.’s Economic Development page stands out from the typical FAQ or rule-based chatbots common in smaller government agencies. It’s a large language model, powered by GPT-4o.

And while Clive can seamlessly field questions about zoning and economic development, it does so with some personality — offering details about its backstory, and how it came to Kentucky from the “vibrant galaxy of Artalon” on a journey zooming through the cosmos on a rainbow racer, now “interning” as a virtual assistant in the shimmering city of Covington.

Before becoming a digital assistant, Clive was already a local fixture in Covington, Ky. Towering over a parking garage, the two-story-high, green alien with a magnifying glass is a quirky public art installation placed in 2023, a testament to the city’s unique character.
Now, he’s been digitized into a cost-effective chatbot, reflecting a growing trend of smaller cities embracing AI. But just how widespread is this adoption of AI for chatbots within small governments? Data from Digital States, Cities and Counties surveys from the Center for Digital Government* reveals some interesting insights.

While states are leading the charge in implementing conversational agents, cities and counties are eager to catch up. A majority of states, 65 percent, already have these tools in place.
However, there’s clear interest in launching these types of programs within city and county governments as well, as 63 percent of city survey respondents have either launched a pilot, proof of concept or implemented a conversational agent program. Counties are following close behind, as 48 percent either have a pilot, proof of concept or full program launched.

WHY A GREEN ALIEN CHATBOT?

Covington’s city business attraction manager, Susan Smith, attended an economic development conference where a presenter for a website enhancement panel mentioned chatbots were underused in economic development.

Meanwhile, Todd Sink, the city’s manager of analytics and intelligence, had just started experimenting with the idea of launching some kind of chatbot to get the conversation around AI started in the city.

“The timing was perfect, as I was just thinking about, ‘How can we advance our website? How can we make it more customer-friendly? How can we make it more usable? It seemed like a no-brainer and I was thrilled,” recalled Smith.

Yet Smith wanted to ensure users understood that the chatbot was not a live human agent. That’s when the idea to assign the popularity of the public art installation to the department’s chatbot identity came into play.

“We wanted to have some fun with it, and the Economic Development department is always very innovative and wants to do quirky things that are on the cutting edge. It was just kind of like a fun idea and everybody was really on board with it,” said Sink.

HOW DID A SMALL CITY LAUNCH AN LLM CHATBOT?

Rather than attempt to create an in-house solution more fitting for a large department budget, Covington is using software from Chatbase to operate Clive. Chatbase offers users the opportunity to build a custom bot and embed it on a website. The service allows users to import data and customize the chatbot’s behavior and appearance. Covington is starting with a basic plan which is less than $200 a year.

Clive was trained on 4.6 billion characters of data from more than 17 PDF files, other documents and 174 web links.

To best understand the chatbot’s abilities, Government Technology asked Clive: “What are people asking you about the most?”

Clive responded: “People often ask me about zoning permits, available incentives for businesses and real estate opportunities in Covington. Additionally, inquiries about job openings with the city and how to apply for various permits are quite common. I’m always here to help with these topics and more!”

“If you don’t have the software or skill set to build one from scratch, it’s great to come across this software. You really don’t have to have a dedicated, ultra data scientist guy behind this,” said Sink.

A disclaimer appears below the chatbot that was crafted by the city’s attorneys, who researched examples of disclaimers from other governments to protect the city from legal complications.
“I look at the chat logs daily to kind of see what people are asking,” Sink said, adding that there’s a programming script set up to extract the chat log and identify the predominant keywords within those questions. “We can kind of see what people are asking, what’s the common themes and then we can really fine-tune it in terms of directing it in a way that’s more specific to certain content people are asking about.”

It’s not yet clear what Clive’s future will be. According to Sink, other city departments have expressed interest in expanding his capabilities into handling topics like parking and code enforcement information.

*Note: The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, the parent company of Government Technology.