Main an AI deployment in a company isn’t any small feat for any CIO, but it surely’s an entire totally different animal when that group is a metropolis.
Working example: Mark Wittenburg, CIO of the Metropolis of Raleigh. His IT group is spearheading an bold effort to use AI in areas starting from managing city development and addressing local weather change to fixing potholes sooner. Wittenburg, talking at Gartner’s latest IT Symposium/Xpo occasion in Orlando, Fla., mentioned the purpose is to not solely make metropolis companies smarter but in addition additional set up Raleigh as a part of a “sensible area.”
“We now have to be progressive,” he mentioned, noting that expectations are excessive. The realm’s constituents are in search of the identical seamless expertise experiences they get from non-public firms.
Certainly, innovation is a part of the area’s DNA. Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, anchors the brainy Analysis Triangle Park — the most important analysis park within the U.S. and residential to company places for Cisco, IBM, Dell, Lenovo, and different tech giants. Wittenburg mentioned the town’s AI initiative is about bettering companies for its 500,000 residents, whereas drawing on the experience of the area’s universities and faculties.
Partnerships with the native universities in Raleigh — North Carolina State College, Shaw College and Meredith School — embrace working intently with college college students, Wittenburg mentioned, sparking “some superb concepts and how you can remedy some real-world challenges that we’ve got.”
Breaking Down Silos to Streamline Workflows
The drive for IT innovation did not begin with AI. Six years in the past, earlier than trendy giant language fashions and AI applied sciences emerged, the Raleigh IT group was already making an effort to work in a extra progressive means. The IT group got down to look at siloed purposes and processes throughout varied metropolis departments to see the place these processes could possibly be streamlined, Wittenburg mentioned.
“How can we take these siloed workflows, like hiring any person, after which what are the items these workflows contact alongside the best way?” he mentioned, for example. “Then we begin to streamline these by sharing information and sharing workflows.”
Testing AI Internally Earlier than Public Rollout
The emergence of generative AI triggered one other alternative to enhance the best way issues labored. The IT groups’ AI consultants began utilizing generative AI (GenAI) internally — Wittenburg did not need to instantly launch it to the general public ought to a serious difficulty come up. “There’s a few good examples of the place that is gone unhealthy,” he mentioned.
By beginning the AI journey internally, Raleigh’s IT group was in a position to start bettering its personal processes first and create a extra environment friendly troubleshooting workflow. Raleigh is utilizing ServiceNow’s AI platform; Wittenburg mentioned that consequently, 95% of assist tickets at the moment are auto-summarized and permitted, and tickets are cleared 66% sooner. By addressing tickets sooner, the IT group can also be in a position to filter service backlogs faster.
Enhancing Metropolis Providers with AI
When contemplating how you can use AI with public-facing processes, Wittenburg took a “crawl, stroll, run” strategy from ideation to manufacturing. That begins with asking a number of questions on which kinds of AI applied sciences take advantage of sense for the town of Raleigh, what enterprise worth AI can ship, and what the dangers are ought to one thing go incorrect, Wittenburg mentioned.
The primary utility of a public-facing AI concerned Raleigh’s water system.
“We digitized all of the data, introduced all that in, after which constructed a mannequin utilizing information analytics, AI, and generative AI to have the ability to begin asking questions round our water infrastructure,” Wittenburg mentioned, noting that the town’s paper data dated again to the 1700s.
The AI mannequin might then be developed and used to determine and predict potential failures within the water infrastructure. As well as, the strategy allowed for the creation of a closed mannequin utilizing Raleigh’s personal water information with an internally constructed AI engine, which is a low-risk technique for testing AI earlier than deploying it extensively, Wittenburg defined. Metropolis workers might additionally confirm the AI’s predictions and enhance the mannequin’s forecasts over time.
Simplifying Authorities Complexity
Subsequent, the IT group built-in ServiceNow’s AI platform with the town of Raleigh’s public chatbot to implement “agentic items to it,” Wittenburg mentioned, referring to AI expertise able to autonomous choice making.
“It was superb, as a result of now it began to make use of the information articles, but it surely additionally began to dig into these closed tickets to different workflows, and to begin to put all that collectively. It is simply superb watching it be taught issues that we did not know we have been doing,” he mentioned.
Whereas studying internally has been crucial, the final word purpose of deploying AI is to convey worth to the group, Wittenburg mentioned. In that vein, Raleigh’s IT group plans to first use agentic AI to enhance conventional metropolis companies, similar to simplifying the method of figuring out and fixing potholes.
Fixing a pothole appears simple sufficient, but it surely includes a lot of steps, Wittenberg mentioned, beginning with figuring out if it is on a metropolis, county or state avenue — three totally different companies with separate cellphone numbers. Folks simply need the pothole mounted, the issue solved.
“What if we might get all these AIs and people brokers and all these companies to cover the complexity of presidency from you all,” he mentioned.
Imaginative and prescient Zero: Agentic AI for Safer Transportation
One other use case the Raleigh IT group is engaged on with AI is “Imaginative and prescient Zero,” utilizing machine studying at visitors intersections to create fashions round car and pedestrian interactions. The purpose is to achieve zero transportation-related fatalities within the metropolis. For Imaginative and prescient Zero, Wittenburg’s group partnered with Nvidia and Esri, a GIS mapping software program, to construct an AI mannequin that might decide if drivers have been going the incorrect means or if a automotive narrowly missed a pedestrian, for instance.
The IT group is starting so as to add GenAI capabilities to ask the AI mannequin to counsel enhancements at intersections based mostly on “close to misses.” The AI mannequin has made options similar to including a proper flip gentle or implementing gentle change delays, Wittenburg mentioned.
Steering for CIOs
In the end, when deploying AI for the group, Wittenburg mentioned it is vital for constituents to have a constant expertise and scale back complexity when they should join with a neighborhood company.
His recommendation to different CIOs and IT professionals beginning out on their IT journey is to determine the governance and “guard rails” for utilizing AI, have a strong information basis and “do not let concern maintain you again.”
