The City of Kelowna increases and speeds access to its services with Azure AI

A city at the forefront of innovation

A four-hour drive east from Vancouver, British Columbia, you’ll find the City of Kelowna nestled on the banks of Okanagan Lake. Serving nearly 150,000 citizens, the city takes pride in its mission of collaboration, responsible decision making, connection with its citizenry, and intelligent adaptation to its ongoing rapid growth. “We have a pretty lofty goal,” says Jazz Pabla, Director of Information Services for the City of Kelowna. “We want to be the best digitally managed city in all of Canada.”

Over the last few years, Pabla has noticed a shift in how citizens engage with the city. More and more often, they choose to reach out to City Hall from their mobile devices. Since at least the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people call, chat, or sign in to the city’s website rather than showing up in person. “Our vision is to create a fully digital-friendly 311 information service, available 24 hours a day, that can deliver accurate answers to a wide range of questions,” says Pabla. “Our challenge,” he adds, “is how to create that service without also creating a tax burden.”

The City of Kelowna met that challenge by embracing AI chat and voice technology. In 2022, in addition to its existing AI solutions, Kelowna automated conversations about its airport with a Microsoft Azure–based solution from Zammo.ai. Since then, the city has expanded on this program’s initial success, using the latest version of the Zammo solution’s native interoperation with Azure OpenAI Service with Azure Cognitive Search. This approach creates a system capable of delivering plainly written or spoken guidance regarding even its most densely written bylaws and those services that appeared less well understood by the public. “We want our citizens to know that Kelowna is a responsive city and that we’ll deliver accurate answers to their questions whenever they ask,” says Pabla. “And if they need to follow up with someone, we’ll also hop on the line during business hours.”

AI as a workforce multiplier

Two years ago, the government of British Columbia gave Kelowna a grant that funded its use of cognitive search technology in the housing sector. Housing supply couldn’t meet demand, and the city designed the project to help accelerate the planning permissions process for new homes and apartments. In the past, citizens who hoped to build housing units on their land had to go to City Hall and spend time with an agent to understand things like the bylaws related to zoning and permitting at their addresses.

Now, with the Azure-based Zammo solution, the city has a quick-reference solution that finds and provides address-specific bylaws and documentation at the click of a button. The solution already offers clearly worded answers to a multitude of construction-related questions. After the city adds Azure OpenAI, the solution will walk applicants through the permitting process, accelerating their ability to build and sell new homes and apartments to the citizens of Kelowna. “We’re going to use AI to streamline the housing process right up to the point where a city planner takes charge,” says Pabla. “We’re not replacing the human touch with our services—we’re just handing the bot the repetitive, transactional conversations that we know it can do a great job with.”

The city has adopted similar AI-supported frameworks for other services. Citizens who call or engage in text-based chat with the city about their property taxes, landfill regulations, and public utilities already benefit from the extended service hours and faster resolution times that stem from collaborative human and AI responses. Soon, people who want to alter their properties—for example, by adding pools or widening their driveways—will have an AI assistant ready any time to walk them through the city’s sometimes complex permitting process documentation. “Nobody wants to deal with a cumbersome permitting process,” says Pabla. “It can be frustrating for our citizens and our staff. Those are the kinds of barriers we want to remove with AI.”

A citizen-centric approach

To help citizens understand and embrace the City of Kelowna’s new AI initiative, Pabla and his team approached the project with the highly intertwined goals of transparency, ethics, and data security. The city is creating an online registry that outlines its data sources and their use, including which departments are responsible for them. Kelowna is also sharing how the system combats discrimination and provides human oversight. “One of the things you learn in the smart city space is that if you don’t transparently engage with your residents, you’re doomed to fail,” says Andreas Boehm, Intelligent Cities Manager at the City of Kelowna. “We’re developing these systems alongside the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, and we’re also very open to ongoing guidance and feedback from the people of Kelowna.”

One of the core principles of the solution in development in Kelowna is how the city limits what Azure OpenAI can do with its data. Although the solution can access government bylaws and maps to formulate address-specific responses, it can’t train its speech or cognitive models with that data. Neither can it use any personal data outside of the government’s solution. Kelowna easily implemented these Azure OpenAI guardrails within the Zammo software user interface. Because this process only draws its responses from information already made publicly available by the city, it enables personalized responses to myriad citizen requests while helping ensure a high rate of accuracy. “When you’re talking about the privacy and needs of our citizens and government employees, these kinds of ethical AI guardrails are absolutely vital,” adds Boehm.

Along with its ethics standards, Kelowna employed a layered security approach for all of its cloud-based systems. “We’ve honed our data security focus in recent years, and we take it very seriously,” says Pabla. “In that time, we’ve cultivated our relationships with Microsoft and Zammo, and we’ve adopted powerful emerging technologies and sunsetted legacy technologies that might one day become more vulnerable.”

Delivering innovation together

When the initiative to introduce bot capabilities to some of the city’s services began more than three years ago, Kelowna was working with a different partner. However, as the initiative grew, the benefits of keeping its services in one technological ecosystem began to take shape. The Zammo solution, which weaves together dozens of AI-centric Azure services, offered an opportunity to unify the city’s AI services within the Microsoft ecosystem.

“Today, we use Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, Azure Cognitive Search, and more,” says Pabla. “It’s a treat to work so closely with Microsoft and Zammo. Without such great relationships, there’s no way that this type of innovation would have happened on its own.”

Empowering a global community with AI

Cities like Kelowna provide dozens of services to their residents. Keeping dedicated staff on standby for each of those services can come with a heavy cost. In turn, freeing up those human operators either to work on the most complex queries or to move into other governmental programs can become a huge advantage. “We field more than 1,000 calls a year regarding our snowplowing schedule,” says Pabla. “The bot has access to GPS data from our plows, and AI can help it layer that data onto our mapping system, giving accurate, real-time responses.”

In 80 percent of cases, AI has already proven that it can deliver correct responses to people who call in about the snow. Through refinements to the system and the introduction of Azure OpenAI, Pabla expects to begin chipping away at the remaining 20 percent of calls. Personnel who field these calls could then be retrained and join other governmental programs in need of their expertise.

In the near future, Pabla and his team expect that even more services will adopt similar AI solutions. If other local governmental entities begin using similar services, travelers who move across Canada will have a more unified, seamless experience. Perhaps frontline government employees will soon have an AI assistant available to help ensure that their work sites meet safety regulations. “You don’t have to be a billion-dollar enterprise to innovate with AI,” says Pabla. “As more of us dive in, more of us will accelerate and grow together—and Kelowna is always striving to be that collaborator.”

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