This year’s winners of the Digital Cities Survey from the Center for Digital Government* have registered accomplishments in a range of areas. They’ve brought AI to the fore, elevated citizen service and pursued innovation to meet their cities’ goals.
The first-place teams sought community input to drive innovation. They tended to their data in support of emerging AI applications and upgraded their constituent interfaces. All have sought to leverage today’s powerful technologies in support of city objectives and resident needs.
All five showed the ability to navigate challenging budgetary times and to ensure their technology initiatives address the genuine human needs of their communities.
TAMARAC, FLA., 1ST PLACE, UP TO 75,000 POPULATION CATEGORY
In Tamarac, Fla., CIO James Twigger points to three pillars supporting IT transformation: “Innovation, collaboration, a culture that embraces change,” he said. “Without those key elements, it really would be hard to do any of this.”
With an initial deployment across six business groups, the center has been fielding 6,000 to 7,000 inbound calls per month, and callers get a more uniform experience. “No matter what channel someone contacts us on, whether it’s a voice phone call, a text message from the cellphone or a web chat, they’re going to hear the same consistent greeting,” he said.
The system gives callers a way to contact the city and get answers from an AI-powered assistant, even outside normal business hours. In a recent analysis, just over 40 percent of the call traffic was fielded by AI, Twigger reported, and half those callers got their questions answered without having to connect to a human.
Tamarac also launched a new community calendar. It’s easier to access and offers a richer experience, with improved navigation and embedded videos. “When someone finds an event, they can have a personalized account, they can mark down what they’re interested in, and they’ll get reminders,” along with prompts directing them to other events that may be of interest, Twigger said.
The calendar is integrated into other city systems. When the Parks and Recreation Department posts a new event, for example, it’s added automatically to the community calendar. “It just makes things flow a lot better,” he said.
Another online enhancement: The city has spun up a website offering AI-powered virtual tours. Two years in the making, the site highlights points of interest, including a public art installation. There’s an element of virtual tourism here, a way for visitors to get to know the city. Homebuyers too can use the tool, as can businesses considering a move to Tamarac.
“We’ve been trying to highlight the city more and more from an economic development standpoint,” Twigger said. “We want to show off Tamarac to businesses, and they can use this as a way to see the city firsthand.”
Up next, Twigger sees potential for the metaverse as a way to help the city connect to younger residents. The IT team has worked with Meta to create a 3D rendering of City Hall and has learned enough to start moving ahead with other use cases.
“Our goal is to be able to engage all demographics, and that includes the younger crowd. I can envision them going to the virtual reality world and contacting us through there. Or maybe they want to take part in a VR aerobics class,” he said. “We can make the city available through that VR world.”
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SOUTH BEND, IND., 1ST PLACE, 75,000-124,999 POPULATION CATEGORY
Chief Innovation Officer Denise Linn Riedl has helped establish policies and governance for the use of generative AI in procurement and other areas in South Bend, Ind. In the past year she’s doubled down on training, to ensure people can put the new capability to work safely and effectively.
“We’ve worked a lot in last-mile training and workplace empowerment around generative AI,” she said. That includes a GenAI user group, and the IT staff runs introductory classes for city staff. There’s also a “generative AI roadshow, where we go to different city offices and city teams, brainstorm AI use cases and projects.”
All this training helps the city to take the next step in AI. A city survey found people feeling a low comfort level around AI, “and we realized we needed to up people’s confidence,” she said.
At the same time, the city used its annual data inventory and governance process to ensure its data is AI-ready. “That was a great way to engage strategically with business units around AI, because obviously AI is only as good as the underlying data,” Riedl said.
“A lot of our city teams are getting pitches from vendors, they’re getting sold things with generative AI functionality in them, and they’re excited about the possibilities,” she explained. “But you can only realize those benefits if the underlying data is good, and you have good metadata, and everything is well organized.”
On the constituent services front, the city’s digital services team did a research sprint to help guide its multiyear effort to create a single sign-on resident experience. They collected data from residents on how they prefer to communicate with the city and what content is most important to them. All that will help inform both the single sign-on project, as well a redesign of the city website.
“We really want to make sure that the next digital generation of South Bend city services is built with residents in mind,” Riedl said.
Another major initiative involved a revamp of the performance management process. The current mayor is “really data savvy. He is a fast-paced, decisive guy,” she said. With that in mind, the team built a process that pulls together relevant key performance indicators and shrunk a two-hour performance management meeting into a 30-minute data huddle.
In addition, South Bend formed a new enterprise software and services team, to better manage a complex software landscape. “Now we have a single team working with every department to build out longer-term product road maps, and then also layering on top elements of resiliency — business continuity plans for our most important pieces of software,” Riedl said.
Now, the IT team is putting the finishing touches on its efforts to bring stronger digital capabilities to South Bend’s new city hall. “We have been outfitting new technology and security in the building — conference room technology, queue management technology,” she said. That includes a city service center: a one-stop shop for services, applications and payments. The goal is to “modernize and digitize everything.”
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SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ., 1ST PLACE, 125,000-249,999 POPULATION CATEGORY
Bianca Lochner sees her mission as Scottsdale, Ariz., CIO clearly: It’s “to deliver better service for a world-class community,” she said. “And that translates to us to really delivering reliable, secure, innovative technologies and solutions that enhance the quality of life for every resident,” as well as for the 11 million visitors the city draws annually.
To that end, she’s been looking for ways to put AI to work. “We start with a problem. What are the challenges or problems, the services that we want to enhance? And from there we co-create solutions,” she said. That collaborative process includes both internal stakeholders and external partners.
That approach has helped the city ramp up AI, deploying Microsoft Copilot to over 1,000 users and launching pilot projects in finance, HR, permitting and public safety operations. “We have been so successful because we have been open to experimentation, and also because we have a long-term strategy — funding it and ensuring that we prioritize based on the city goals, so that we can then scale those use cases based on the value that they add,” she said.
Lochner also has led efforts to modernize the city’s data platform, moving over 1,500 internal users to a cloud-native system. “Now we can connect all those siloed systems and data points to leverage AI and those intelligence automation capabilities,” she said.
At the same time, the city put in place a new ERP system. The old platform couldn’t integrate easily with new solutions, and that was hindering modernization. The new system overcomes those hurdles.
On the public-facing side, the IT team led a redesign of the city website and implemented a new enterprisewide calendar solution. In building the new site, “we really thought about the experience of our end users, and we certainly engaged with them. We surveyed our residents and tourists. We built prototypes. And we only deployed when we had validation that we meet the high expectations of our residents,” Lochner said. Those efforts paid off: With the new site, mobile traffic is up by 22 percent, and user satisfaction increased by 38 percent.
Looking ahead, the city will be ramping up AI training. “We’ve already started the training and we want to take it to next level,” she said. The legal department, for example, already is ramping up a prototype training program with Arizona State University.
Lochner also is looking to expand the AI-powered contact center solution to include nonemergency 911 to take some of the pressure off dispatchers. And the city is aiming to expand its ground-breaking unmanned drone program. “We’re adding additional drones to enhance the real-time crime center and provide accurate, real-time insights at the site of an incident, even before our first responders get there,” she said.
That will come with a public awareness campaign, she said, “engaging with our constituents to make sure they know what the drone does and what those missions are used for.”
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LONG BEACH, CALIF., 1ST PLACE, 250,000-499,999 POPULATION CATEGORY
The city of Long Beach is taking the long view. “One of the things I’m really proud of is our creation of our 2028 strategic road map,” said CIO Lea Eriksen.The map is the product of a robust process, with strong participation from residents and city employees.
“We even had workshops with community members, and a survey. From there we identified 31 actionable recommendations that are helping to guide us as a technology organization to support the city’s 2030 strategic vision and also our preparedness for the 2028 Olympics,” she said.
That road map lays out a vision for “a connected, secure and future-ready Long Beach,” she said.
In line with that vision, the city has in fact been actively exploring emerging technologies. Here again, collaboration is key. Pilot projects have been driven by Pitch Long Beach! — a program that allows companies to submit unsolicited ideas for technology to improve city services — and by LB Co-Lab, an initiative that pairs community members with city staff to co-design and implement solutions.
Eriksen has also been focused on building public trust. “We drafted a data privacy policy, and we held digital rights workshops with our community to let people know about their rights in state law … as well as what the city’s doing with data that’s collected,” she said. “One of our guiding principles is to be responsible stewards of data and to inform our residents about what they can do to protect their own data.”
In support of this, the city has partnered with California State University, Long Beach to create an interactive digital rights platform to keep residents informed, a project they continue to build on.
Amid all these efforts, Eriksen maintains a focus on the people bringing innovative IT to life in support of city goals. The Technology and Innovation Department (TID) last year launched a professional development initiative, “where every TID employee was offered the opportunity to create a plan to improve their skills and align with the TID values of exploratory mindset and agility, so that they can accomplish the TID strategic road map,” Eriksen said.
Now, a new National Science Foundation grant will help the city to continue building out its digital rights platform. Along with that effort, “we’re going to be releasing edutainment videos that help inform the public about the technologies that the city has and the data that we’re collecting and how we’re using it,” Eriksen said.
The city also is in the midst of finalizing its AI strategy, “and we’re also going to strengthen our internal capacity — training our team members on how to use AI responsibly, making sure they understand the tools that are being made available,” she said.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF., 1ST PLACE, 500,000 OR MORE POPULATION CATEGORY
In San Jose, CIO Khaled Tawfik is putting people first. “We believe in the need to educate before we can innovate, so we have been pushing really hard to upskill our team on how to identify data, how to manage it, how to display it in dashboards and more importantly, how to preserve it and protect it,” he said.
To use AI effectively, “you have to have good data, and to have good data you have to have governance and you have to have education,” Tawfik said. An initiative in partnership with San Jose State University trained over 400 people last year, and he is aiming to eventually train all 7,000 city employees on the basics.
The city also is working to be more forward-looking in responding to resident issues. Rather than wait for people to complain about a pothole or graffiti, “we’re trying to change the business model to be more proactive and predictive,” he said.
“If we can use every camera that we own — on street sweepers, on trash collectors and parking enforcements — and we catch graffiti and potholes before the public, then we have an opportunity to fix it and take care of the issue before the public sees it,” he said.
A new 311 hub meanwhile is helping transform the constituent digital experience. Residents typically don’t understand the jurisdictional lines: They don’t know where to report a problem. By making 311 a regional system, Tawfik is looking to take that responsibility off the residents.
“If you are at the entry point of a freeway, you probably don’t know if the city owns it or the county,” he said. “We can triage this ticket or this report and send it to another agency, and that takes away the guessing game for the constituents.”
At the same time, the city has been working to build up its enterprisewide cyber-resilience strategy.
The region will host both the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup in the next two years and Tawfik wants to be ready. A new, state-of-the-art emergency operations center “gives us the ability to collaborate with different state and federal security agencies to make sure that all of us are connected and communicating in an efficient manner … and cyber is going to be a part of that conversation,” he said.
Internally, the cyber strategy again starts with the people, including monthly training programs and full-day events during Cybersecurity Month in October. “We invite the FBI agents and different experts from different levels of government to share examples and stories where they have seen the highest risk,” he said.
Looking ahead, Tawfik is sharing data on road safety and road-adjacent issues (i.e., graffiti or overgrown vegetation) to create a multicity pool of data for training AI. “If we bring the data together in one shareable national road safety library, each city or agency can focus on training one model,” he said. “Everybody’s participating in advancing the training for AI, and that allows us to share and take advantage of each other’s work.”
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*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Government Technology’s parent company.
