 Prompt Local
Issue No. 5 · Tuesday, September 1, 2026 · By Scott Olsen | ||||||
|
PULL UP A CHAIR This week's pick walks through Citibot, Polimorphic, and Copilot Studio, three ways to let AI answer resident questions after hours. Good tools, all three. But which one you pick isn't really what I wanted to talk about this week. Here's my opinion. A chatbot has a shelf life inside any one resident's conversation. That's not a knock on the technology. It's about that specific exchange. If someone just needs to know where to click to pay a ticket online, a chatbot is exactly the right tool, fast, easy, done. But the second that same conversation turns into something complicated, the kind where the person actually needs someone to think alongside them, not just get pointed somewhere, that shelf life runs out fast. I think that's exactly what these tools were built for: pointing people in the right direction, not carrying a long-term conversation. If it can't get someone where they need to be in the first two or three steps, the right move is getting them on the phone with a real person, not making the bot try harder. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I still think the phone is underrated. Everybody's so wrapped up in what their device can do beyond actually talking to someone, they've forgotten what the phone was for in the first place. I grew up when the phone still had a cord and lived somewhere fixed in the house, not in your pocket. My first cell phone charged extra to talk during the day, and getting nights and weekends free felt like a real win. I remember how excited I was when I got my first iPhone. I've watched this technology change more in my lifetime than most people would believe, and somewhere in there we forgot the original point of the device was to have a conversation. Customer service is dying in almost every business I deal with. It should not be allowed to die in government. No matter how good the AI is, if your job is to help the public, that stays the priority, and you use whatever tool actually gets that done, sometimes that's the chatbot, sometimes it's picking up the phone. More often than I can count, I've watched someone misread a text or an email: assume a tone that wasn't there, assume they were being asked for something they weren't, feel like someone was upset when they weren't, or miss that someone actually was upset when they were. A five-second phone call settles all of it instantly. Never let the technology get in the way of that. Never let it flatten a conversation with someone who might actually be having a hard day and just needs a little help. Where does your office draw that line, the point where a bot hands off to a person? Hit reply and tell me, I'd like to know. THIS WEEK'S PICK Who answers the phone after 5pm?Residents do not stop having questions when your office closes. A resident-facing AI chatbot can field the routine stuff, permit fees, hours, how to pay a bill, around the clock, and hand off anything it cannot answer to a real person the next morning. Three real options, at very different price points.
IF YOU ALREADY RUN MICROSOFT 365 Copilot StudioMicrosoft's build-your-own-agent tool. You point it at your own website and FAQ pages and it answers from that content. The City of Burlington built "CoBy" this way, and Montréal runs a public-facing version on its own city site. The tradeoff against Citibot: this is a kit you assemble yourself, not a finished product a vendor hands you, so it fits an office with some internal IT capacity better than one that wants to just sign a contract and be done. Cost: $200/month for a pool of 25,000 message credits shared across your tenant, or pay-as-you-go at roughly a penny a credit Setup: built inside Power Platform, needs someone comfortable configuring it
BEFORE YOU SIGN ANYTHING 1. Ask any vendor for a reference from an office close to your size, not just their biggest logo. What works for Denver does not automatically work for a town of 12,000. 2. Ask exactly what happens when it does not know the answer. A good setup hands the resident to a human cleanly, a bad one leaves them stuck arguing with a bot. 3. Ask how long it actually takes to train on your content before go-live. Any honest vendor will tell you this is weeks, not the "five minutes" the demo makes it look like. The honest catch: none of these are a plug-and-play free tool like past picks in this newsletter. They are real purchases with a real procurement process behind them. Worth it if your office is genuinely drowning in the same repeat questions, not worth it if you get a handful of calls a day. THE RULEBOOK · TWO RULES WORTH A GLANCE What changed that affects how your office can use AI. Short, plain, and sourced. The part that keeps you out of the newspaper. Tagged Local for a city or county action, State for a change at the state level, Federal for a change at the federal level that reaches your desk.
FREE THIS WEEK
ONE MORE QUICK WIN Count your repeat questions before you buy anythingBefore you talk to a single chatbot vendor, spend a week having whoever answers your phones jot down the questions that come up over and over. That list is your actual business case, and it is the same list a vendor will ask you for anyway. Do it first and you walk into that conversation knowing exactly what you need, instead of buying whatever the sales demo made look impressive. | ||||||
|
Know someone at another city or county who could use this? Forward it over.
Until next week, Scott Olsen, CGCIO Former CIO with eleven years in Florida local government Practical guidance for local government, not legal or procurement advice. |