Accurate information in seconds
With Elastic, the City of Sacramento created a public-facing AI-powered search that delivers summaries and citations for fast results that people can trust.
Virtual assistant in 6 months
The City of Sacramento staff worked closely with Elastic consultants to create a virtual assistant in six months.
Focusing on services
Using the virtual assistant, powered by Elastic, staff get their questions answered quickly, allowing them to stay in the flow and improve city services.
The City of Sacramento uses Elasticsearch as the foundation for AI chatbots and search, helping both city employees and residents find information they need faster
As California's capital, the City of Sacramento serves more than half a million residents in a diverse Northern California community. The city is committed to improving everyday life through high-quality critical infrastructure and public programs, from essential utilities such as water and garbage services to investments in arts, culture, and public spaces.
For Mrudul Sadanandan, Assistant Director of IT, one of the ways Sacramento stands out is how it embraces technology. "Working for the City of Sacramento is like working for both a startup and a local government. We're encouraged to experiment and use technology to deliver new and better services, and we get to see the impact on our community as well."
Helping residents find the answers they need
Over the past several years, the city has focused on modernizing and improving experiences for the public through its digital portals. With thousands of web pages across more than 10 websites, residents often struggled to find the answers to their questions. What should someone do if they find a stray dog? Who do they contact to replace a broken garbage bin? How many chickens can families raise in their backyard?
When residents couldn’t find answers online, they emailed city departments directly or called the 311 customer service hotline. If the city could improve search, it would free up hours of time for employees and improve resident experiences.
Elasticsearch on Elastic Cloud, running on Google Cloud, now provides core search and indexing capabilities for all of the city’s websites. By integrating Google Gemini with internal systems and Elasticsearch, the city created an AI-powered search engine that helps residents and city employees find the answers they need in a fraction of the time.
Doing more with Elastic
The City of Sacramento first deployed Elastic to support basic web search on its websites. When the city undertook a major website redesign, including a new information architecture, IT teams saw an opportunity to re-evaluate its search infrastructure. After looking at available solutions on the market, they chose Elasticsearch.
"Elastic checked all of the boxes, balancing functionality with ease of use. It met our scaling needs, brought in data from multiple sites, and provided capabilities such as semantic search and machine learning right out of the box."
The city started using Elastic for search and indexing across all public and internal sites. It built on that, using Elastic as the indexing and data retrieval layer for an internal virtual assistant. The AI-powered assistant, called SacGPT, helps city staff quickly find information and resources through a friendly chatbot interface.
A team of city developers worked with Elastic consultants to build the solution based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) methodology. "Elastic gave us the support we needed to understand the best way to build our assistant, such as how to best use multiple datasets," says Sadanandan. "With the support of Elastic engineers, we successfully completed this project 30% faster than the originally anticipated timeline."
"With the virtual assistant, staff can stay in the flow, work faster, and ultimately improve services for residents across Sacramento."
When city staff asks the virtual assistant a question, Elastic uses machine learning and semantic search to look through all available information to find relevant content. The data feeds into Google Gemini, which uses generative AI to generate a response for the assistant.
The virtual assistant helps city staff independently research questions and quickly find answers that might be buried in policy documents. It's also now a valuable tool for onboarding new employees, giving them direct access to procedures and institutional knowledge and reducing the time needed for supervisor guidance. "With the virtual assistant, staff can stay in the flow, work faster, and ultimately improve services for residents across Sacramento."
"Elastic and Google Cloud enabled us to create a very precise AI search. People can trust the results, and that makes all of the difference for the public."
Bringing AI search to the public
After more than half a year of using SacGPT internally, the city decided it was ready for public release. It had already introduced a simple public-facing agent to provide call deflection and take full call details for the 311 city information call center, handling more work than four full-time employees daily.
The newest release of SacGPT adds AI-powered search features to the city's public websites. Residents can ask questions using natural language and, much like the internal version of SacGPT, Elastic finds relevant content from web pages to PDF documents and feeds it into Gemini. Gemini then creates and displays a summary alongside a list of links as citations.
Residents get relevant answers fast without having to read through long web pages or download documents to find information. The citations still provide easy access for those who need all the details or want to learn more about related topics. "Elastic and Google Cloud enabled us to create a very precise AI search," says Sadanandan. "The results can be trusted, and that makes all the difference for the public."
Building confidence in AI
As the city rolls out more AI use cases, the accuracy and convenience displayed through SacGPT improve the public's confidence in what AI can do. For instance, working with the AI-powered document management platform CARA, which incorporates Elasticsearch, the city's public records are readily available and searchable to half a million residents. This helps the city comply with the California Public Records Act by adding a self-service method for residents to obtain copies of public records.
The city also plans to modernize contact center operations, using AI to support a single platform to handle questions from residents across text, mobile app, and telephone. This will reduce the load on city employees, allowing them to focus on responding faster or handling more complex inquiries.
"By continuing to roll out AI, we're helping city employees focus on what matters: making Sacramento a fun, safe, and comfortable place to live," says Sadanandan.
