Asset Panda, which sells asset management software to governments, hospitals, utilities, schools, construction companies and other operations, has released a product called Ursa.
The Dallas-based firm, founded in 2012, says the new AI-powered platform “helps state and local governments manage infrastructure, equipment and public safety assets more efficiently,” while offering other advantages.
Ursa integrates AI into the Asset Panda Pro asset management system for tasks such as asset tracking, inspections and report generation. The product release comes as other gov tech suppliers are beefing up their own asset management capabilities.
A statement offered this example of how Ursa works: A worker in the field photographs equipment — that is, assets — and then requests an inspection. The Asset Panda tech analyzes the image and provides findings and then stores the results in the relevant records.
What the company calls “simple prompts” can help department leaders, meanwhile, do their own reports, and to quickly learn the availability or maintenance status of assets, which can include anything from laptops to vehicles to machinery. The tool also provides “clear visibility into asset depreciation,” according to the statement.
The company’s sales pitch boils down to this: The AI tool can replace relatively burdensome processes based on spreadsheets, bringing time savings and other efficiencies to the management of what often amounts to thousands of assets across any one government.
“It’s not a chatbot,” Justin Lackey, president of Asset Panda, told Government Technology. “It’s a real AI layer that understands the work itself. It can really build things and it builds it through natural language.”
That refers to users who can conduct searches via the tool, which Lackey said was designed for people who lack deep software administration skills.
He said the new Asset Panda product offers a deeply practical way for public agencies to use AI as the technology continues to gain massive traction in the space — growth that sparks its own questions of when AI will truly scale.
As Lackey sees it, Ursa offers an AI “entry point,” with governments able to deploy the tool to specific departments first before deciding on further use.
“They can bring in one department and one tenant at a time,” he said. “Asset Panda can be that first foot in the water.”
