New lab tests AI tools with cities

Local government technology provider CivicPlus has launched a new unit to develop and test AI tools with cities, focusing on administrative processes, access to services and regulatory compliance.

Innovation Labs will involve municipal staff and residents in identifying problems, testing prototypes and providing feedback before tools are made more widely available.

“The opportunity comes in how we rethink solving those operational pain points that local governments have lived with for years,” Desta Price, Chief Product and Technology Officer at CivicPlus, told Cities Today.

The unit will draw on conversations with local government staff at industry events, feedback from users and the experience of employees who have worked in municipalities.

“Many of our own employees came from local government, and some are still actively serving their communities today, so we often have a front-row seat to these challenges instead of viewing them from the outside looking in,” Price said.

Its work will also be informed by CivicPlus’ Resident Satisfaction and Trust research, which has gathered more than 34,000 responses over eight US survey waves since 2022. The surveys have identified a link between residents’ digital experiences and their reported trust in local government.

“When we talk about listening to residents, it isn’t a one-time survey,” Price said. “It’s a running, multi-year read on what’s actually building or eroding trust, and that feeds directly into where CivicPlus Innovation Labs focuses.”

The initiative follows the release of six AI products in January 2026. One of these, CivicPlus Agent, searches local government records, policies, forms and public notices.

An unnamed city has used the system to turn more than 645,000 PDFs into a searchable knowledge base. Price said it had helped call centre staff and residents find information more quickly, although no detailed performance figures were provided.

Another tool, CivicPlus Athena, gives municipal employees a central place to find information and complete tasks across several products.

Future tools developed by the lab will be integrated into the existing Civic Impact Platform and grounded in information supplied by each municipality. Price said staff would review and approve AI-generated material before it was released, while safeguards would be used to protect personally identifiable information.

Municipalities and individual employees will also be able to opt out of AI-supported functions without losing access to existing automation and integrations.

“A community that isn’t ready to use AI in a given workflow can keep using the automation and integrations they already rely on,” Price said. “That’s how we keep AI adoption from turning into a new vendor relationship or a parallel system to manage.”

The lab will work with existing product teams, but the company has not yet revealed which projects it will pursue first or when its initial tools will be available.

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