City staff in the planning department at Bellevue, Wash., have a new assistant that already has a commanding understanding of development codes, zoning maps and other detailed information.
The department has been using an AI-powered “smart assistant” to aid in the city’s permitting processes. Earlier this month, Bellevue moved the project — a partnership with Govstream.ai — from its early testing phase to “real-world scenarios,” Sabra Schneider, Bellevue CIO, said.
The smart assistant tool has been trained in the city’s development code, GIS data, zoning codes, parcel data, permit history and more so that it can assist in speeding up the permitting process, Safouen Rabah, founder and CEO for Govstream.ai, said.
“The system drafts code-cited emails, checks plans for completeness, flags zoning conflicts, and answers routine questions,” Rabah said via email. “But staff always remain in control — reviewing, editing and making final decisions.”
The assistant is three tools in one, Schneider said via email: chat, email and voice, “all tied into the same knowledge base and built for government use, with traceability and staff oversight built in from the start.”
For now, planning staff is using the AI assistant to look up parcel-specific zoning rules and then generate draft responses to resident inquiries, with citations to the development code.
“We’re also starting to use the tool to analyze conversations between the AI assistants and staff for thematic insights about how our community interacts with different aspects of permitting,” Schneider said.
Ultimately, technology like this smart assistant will free staff from repetitive tasks — which Rabah described as “document toil” — allowing them to focus on “judgment-driven work like safety, equity and community priorities.”
Bellevue also plans to extend the technology to the public so that residents, designers or contractors can also benefit from fast, “citation-based answers” to questions regarding projects or processes, Schneider said.
Initiatives like the Govstream.ai pilot stem from Bellevue’s Innovation Forum, which brought together members of the community, startups, students and others to brainstorm how to enhance city services and the overall quality of life — part of a broader strategy, Schneider said, to make innovation more open and actionable. The city will host a Civic Innovation Day Oct. 16 to highlight civic innovation in the greater Puget Sound area.
AI tools that help to cut down on repetitive tasks, search quickly through data or smooth out workflow gaps work in the kinds of areas where experts say artificial intelligence can bring value to organizations. The technology, they stress, should serve people.
“When I talk about artificial intelligence, I not only talk about computation. I talk about people, first and foremost,” Nathan McNeese, founding director of the Clemson University Center for Human-AI Interaction, Collaboration and Teaming, said during a recent webinar to discuss the new report, Strategies for Integrating AI into State and Local Government Decision Making: Rapid Expert Consultation, by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
“You need to understand who your people are before you can even have the idea of putting AI into an organization. Because AI’s going to fail in your organization if people are not your first consideration,” he said.
And starting small — a pilot project in one city department, limited to internal staff — is also advisable, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer science professor at Brown University, where he directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign, said as he urged tech leaders to embrace an ethos of experimentation and “sandboxing” to understand how the AI systems work, within a specific context.
“AI is not like buying a piece of software, you buy it once, and it’s done, because it serves a specific purpose,” Venkatasubramanian said during the webinar. “It’s one of those things where it’s an ongoing conversation amongst the folks using the system, the folks impacted by the system.”
