How lifelike AI became Amarillo's face — and a new gateway to city services

Sponsored by Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA

Emma is a digital human who serves as an always-on call center agent for Amarillo, Texas. The city's diverse population meant that a lifelike representative needed to be fluent in many languages and expressions, as well as in a wide range of city services, from trash pickup to library hours.

There was no model for an AI undertaking like this, says Amarillo chief technology officer Rich Gagnon. The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA enabled Amarillo to become the first city in the world to offer its citizens access to a digital human who looks and talks like them. And, because of Emma's efficiency in handling high inquiry volumes, she quickly paid for herself, offsetting the $1.8 million expense of a call-center expansion.

Learn how the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA can power your way to AI here: http://dell.com/YourWaytoAI

Transcript:
Emma came out of a very simple idea. What if instead of going to a typical government website, you could just talk to the city on the website and get an answer.

My name is Rich Gagnon. I am Assistant City Manager and Chief Technology Officer for the City of Amarillo. Technology plays a huge part in everyday life here. The whole Panhandle region has always been known for pioneering, but it's always been in the traditional fields: oil and gas and cattle, and certainly we're very innovative in that.

Emma sends a different message: that that innovation carries across all kinds of industries. Emma came out of a very simple idea. What if instead of going to a typical government website, you could just talk to the city on the website and get an answer? And that's really where the Dell AI factory with NVIDIA came into play for us. They actually kind of upleveled what we were thinking about, and we went from just a simple agent to a full digital human.

"Hi, I'm Emma, your digital assistant for the city of Amarillo. I'm here to help you find the information you need."

We are a very diverse community. We needed Emma to represent all of Amarillo. To be able to introduce a resident to a different digital human that looks, sounds and feels like them - seems like a small thing, but I think it sends a really clear message that at Amarillo everybody matters. So when a resident sees Emma, what they're seeing is the animation piece, but behind that, you have your speech-to-text, which is actually hearing the voice of a resident and converging that into text to send the query. You also have text-to-speech, so the answer gets translated back into speech. Behind that, we actually have a vector database and that is sourced from our website. So when I ask Emma a question, that hits an AI model on the back to make that conversational.

Our typical questions are often about how I pay a water bill ... What are the library hours? So far this year I think we've processed just under 33,000 questions. Our original ROI was really around the deferment of $1.8 million in additional hiring just to handle the call load. But we're starting to see different kinds of ROI as well. Every call center struggles with turnover. When you have Emma as your assistant, she's an assistant to every one of our agents, so turnover goes down, ramp time goes down, our response time goes down. We were the first government to do this, I think the second entity on the planet.

We knew that Dell AI factory with NVIDIA was the right partner because we already had a long history with Dell. They were a big part of our entire innovation program from the start. We have folks working in their lab right now with the team testing agentic functionality, and it's really the value that they brought to us with Emma. They're taking a lot of the technology development off of our plate so that we can focus on just the business case. Most cities don't think about things like first mover advantage. That's very much a commercial concept. We believe to our core that AI can enhance human dignity if it's done right, and I think by leading in both, not just running down the technology path, but by leading in both, we've sent a message not just to our community but outside our community that, hey, we're open for business and we can be innovative in a way that you're comfortable with.