Business leaders don’t often look to governments for best practices when it comes to scaling AI. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Amarillo, Texas. There, an AI-powered digital assistant became the world’s first public-facing municipal AI digital human. This makes Amarillo a world leader in highly personalized customer service delivered in real-time and responsively.
Emma, the city’s AI digital assistant and digital front door to city services, answers approximately 5,000 questions each month, saving the city $1.8 million in call center expansion. In other words, this project combines the two AI milestones most coveted by enterprise leaders. and ROI.
Amarillo’s demonstration of high-performance AI infrastructure has helped attract billions of dollars in economic investment, said Rich Gagnon, deputy city administrator and chief technology officer.
“Most cities don’t think about things like first-mover advantage,” Gagnon said. “This is a very commercial concept. But it also exists in cities. How do you as an IT organization absorb that and act responsibly and quickly?”
Real-time digital human rendering at scale
For Gagnon, the answer lies in the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, Dell Professional Services, and Uneeq. This collaboration helped Amarillo turn an ambitious concept into an operational model.
Amarillo, a diverse city in the Texas Panhandle, sought to streamline the way residents access services in a way that serves residents across cultures and languages.
Amarillo has been thoughtful in establishing a human-first approach to implementing AI. The City has partnered with Digital Rights House Amsterdam to develop the Digital Dignity and Rights Ordinance. The ordinance was adopted by the Amarillo City Council and helped build public trust before deployment.
Gagnon’s original vision was to base the digital assistant on a real human, photographed and animated by AI.
When Gagnon turned to Dell Services for project design guidance and beta testing expertise, he experienced two key moments. The first is that people prefer digitally rendered humans. They didn’t have to guess whether they were looking at an AI or not. The assistant also needed access to a vector database powered by a streamlined government website.
Following Dell’s advice, Gagnon and the Office of Engagement and Innovation recognized that Emma’s success would depend on the quality of the information she received. The team accelerated the development of a complete content transformation, resulting in a new website focused on clean data and conversational information. This created the basis of Emma’s knowledge, her source of truth.
Accelerate adoption with Dell AI Factory with Nvidia
The city is currently rebuilding its entire digital network around specialized Dell and Nvidia computing infrastructure to become an AI-centric organization.
“Dell AI Factory and Nvidia have been part of our innovation program from the beginning, so we knew they were the right partners,” said Gagnon. This tight integration was essential to mapping needs to a solution and quickly deploying Emma, launching it 24 months earlier than expected.
Providing many services under one roof
Emma acts as a digital concierge, creating a near-zero-click experience that connects residents to answers directly from the homepage. Rather than asking users to navigate menus, Emma provides conversational responses based on information from the city’s website.
This far exceeds the initial ROI that Gagnon gave Emma, and plans for a $1.8 million expansion of the city’s 311 call center have been postponed. The assistant resolved so many inquiries that additional assistance was no longer needed. After its release, the user approval rate exceeded 90%, indicating high adoption and trust. Every interaction influences city leaders’ decisions about improving existing services or developing new ones.
“We see her impact across the board,” Gagnon said.
Amarillo’s Roadmap to Emma
Gagnon’s roadmap calls for multiple versions of Emma across different hardware types, each designed for a different purpose. These include an information kiosk at City Hall, an airport unit for non-English speakers, and a Civic Center terminal where visitors can ask about events. Internal agent workloads (authorization request status, form filling, cross-department system coordination) are being moved on-premises for better data management and more predictable costs.
Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is more than just an enterprise AI solution, Gagnon says, it’s also a transformational mindset. The AI Factory concept Dell presented to him reshaped the way cities themselves operated. Amarillo currently operates an innovation team that develops prototype products for each department, an engagement team that gathers feedback from residents, and a project management office that ships the results.
“What we learned in Amarillo is that we’re small enough to be nimble, but big enough that you can build models out of us,” Gagnon said. “We sent the message that you can be innovative in any way you feel comfortable.”
Learn more about how Dell AI Factory and Nvidia deliver secure, customizable solutions for your business.
this Sponsored Post Created by BI Studios and Dell AI Factory and Nvidia.