The city of Boston has selected an AI-native platform — meaning AI is a core component of its functionality — to support the city’s evolving customer service needs, replacing its legacy on-prem 311 system.
Improving 311 services is one way that governments are using AI to improve service delivery, more efficiently routing calls, enabling translation capabilities and adding capacity to combat staffing shortages.
In Boston, 311 services were previously powered by an on-prem system sitting on structured query language servers that was more than a decade old, according to Jay Greenspan, Boston’s senior director of basic city services technology. There is a “technological imperative,” he said, to replace a system that is no longer meeting the government’s needs. The city selected Creatio to meet those needs.
The Creatio platform’s implementation typically is categorized into three phases, per Jason Olkowski, the company’s chief strategy and solution consulting officer: “design, go-live and everyday delivery.”
The city finished integrating all of its major platforms in the past several weeks, Greenspan said. Part of the change management process involved getting departmental users comfortable with the new platform, he said. Now, he’s looking forward to the phase of “iterative improvement,” to be able to be more transparent and responsive to meet residents’ needs.
The city used a request for proposal process to find a platform that would support service delivery, ultimately leading to the decision to adopt Creatio’s AI-native platform. A key part of the decision was that Creatio offers an adaptable no-code platform, Greenspan said. Often, in the public sector, software solutions built for governments require reliance on the vendors that built them to make changes, Greenspan said; a no-code solution gives city officials more control. For a government organization, where there are limited resources and staff, officials saw the value of a user-friendly solution that empowered small teams to take on bigger projects without extensive programming experience.
“We wanted the ability to say to our customers in the city — whether that’s residents or departmental users — that we can make these improvements,” Greenspan said.
Photo courtesy of Creatio.
One such example Greenspan highlighted involved the Boston Election Department, where there was a need for more rigorous records of interactions and incidents. One person on Greenspan’s team was able to stand up a simple application with routing, single sign-on and security measures in place to support elections in a matter of weeks. This, he said, wouldn’t have been possible with the city’s previous system: “So, that was a real success.”
There is a heightened need for government customers to be responsible with every dollar and be able to demonstrate a return on investment, Olkowski said, so the agility enabled through no-code solutions empowers government teams.
AI has several functions within the Creatio platform, Olkowski said. There is predictive AI from a machine learning perspective to help recommend next best actions for various workflows, and there is generative AI in the natural language interface enabling direct interactions with the system. Where the system is going, he said, is agentic AI, enabling it to take actions on behalf of users. These three different areas power the platform’s capabilities to drive more efficiencies for customers.
“And, certainly, in the case of governments and cities like the city of Boston, it’s about, how do we make the best use of the tax dollars and add value in to the citizens,” Olkowski said. One study, he said, found Creatio’s initial implementation to have a 70 percent quicker timeline compared to other platforms. Boston’s initial deployment took about four months, which Greenspan said officials considered to be faster than some other similar endeavors.
A key metric that demonstrates the ROI, Olkowski said, is the speed of initial deployment for various solutions, as was evident through the city’s use case for the Election Department. Without Creatio’s platform, Greenspan said, the city would have likely had to contract with another vendor to deliver that solution.
With its major systems integrated, Greenspan said he looks forward to moving into the phase of everyday delivery, enabling smoother communications with residents in order to make their lives easier.
“I think in the near future, we will be able to do some measuring on how these transformations are actually improving delivery of services,” Greenspan said.
