Meet Emma, Amarillo’s AI assistant and ‘digital human’

Tucked alongside Route 66 in the thick of the Texas panhandle, the city of Amarillo is known by most for its windy and wildly erratic weather, agricultural élan and its historic status as one of America’s true Western cow towns of yore.

Yet the city once famous for cowboys and cattle drives is quickly developing a reputation as an artificial intelligence innovator behind an ambitious plan to develop what city officials anthropomorphically describe as a “digital human” named Emma.

In technical terms, Emma is an online digital assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence technology to audibly communicate with the city’s 200,000-plus residents. When Emma becomes fully operational later this year, city officials expect the digital assistant to converse multilingually across more than 60 languages, adroitly answering questions, retrieving information and, when necessary, connecting them to the proper, real-life human to speak with.

Emma’s multilingual capabilities are critical because modern-day Amarillo is diverse. Over the decades, the city opened its doors to tens of thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, becoming what The New York Times dubbed the “Queens of the Texas High Plains,” comparing Amarillo to the New York City borough. Nearly a quarter of Amarillo’s residents do not speak English as their primary language and at least 62 languages and dialects are spoken across Amarillo schools.

Rich Gagnon, Amarillo’s assistant city manager and chief information officer, said the city’s foray into generative AI began 18 months ago when he wondered whether AI’s language translation capabilities might better connect the city to its residents. 

“We have a large refugee population and some issues you would normally find in much larger cities,” Gagnon told Route Fifty in an interview Monday at Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas. “The whole premise behind Emma is that instead of typing or searching for information, you can just have a conversation with her in the language you speak and get access to nonemergency city services and information.”

While the outcome sounds simple, Gagnon said it required a joint effort from his IT team and Dell Technologies, which the Amarillo City Council unanimously awarded a half-million dollar contract to last year to develop Emma. The city had previously used the company to help modernize its legacy IT systems, and it is still providing a mix of hardware, software and professional services to Amarillo under this contract.

“We actually talked to several vendors, but Dell came to play,” Gagnon said.

Dell Technologies is one of several major tech companies investing significant resources in generative AI, and for good reason. McKinsey & Company estimates generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in economic benefits to the global economy, 75% of which will be driven by customer operations, like chatbots and call center support. Building on its partnership with AI chip manufacturer NVIDIA, the company recently announced the Dell AI Factory, which it bills as a “one-stop-shop” for potential customers looking to implement AI solutions.

“Aimed at elevating self-service experiences with Gen AI technologies and a humanistic AI avatar interface, this solution allows users to interact with an intelligent digital assistant through natural conversation in practically any language, at any time of day,” said Bethan Williams, Dell Technologies’ global portfolio lead, applications and data consulting. “Organizations can utilize digital assistants to automate a broad range of interactions, from simple queries to multistep exchanges, saving time and money while freeing up valuable human resources to focus on more strategic, high-impact work.”

Amarillo is among the first cities to implement a chatbot underpinned by generative AI, but it could serve as an example to other public sector organizations with similar challenges. Gagnon estimated Emma’s cost “is significantly less” than what it would cost to add additional staff to do the equivalent amount of work Emma will do, and Emma could remove some of the mundanity of his current staff’s roles, allowing them to focus on other tasks.

At first, Amarillo leaned heavily on Dell Technologies’ professional AI expertise to build the large language model and lay the technological groundwork for Emma. But through a mix of educating city leaders and IT staff on AI—Gagnon joked that “Amarillo is not Seattle,” where there is tech talent on every corner—gradually, Amarillo’s IT team has absorbed more of the work.

Emma now contains all the public-facing data available on the city’s websites, but Gagnon said it’s important to note that Emma isn’t connected to the city’s internal systems, so the digital assistant won’t be able to divulge any private information. Amarillo is currently engaged in a multistage vetting process in a dev-test environment to ensure Emma’s software understands residents correctly before Emma makes a formal appearance on the city of Amarillo’s website, expected in October.

“We’re bringing in residents to ask the same questions to Emma because one of our learnings is that you and I won’t ask the same questions the same exact way,” Gagnon said. “Innovation in the private sector is private, you can do that in the basement and develop a competitive advantage. In the public sector, you have to innovate in public.”

In short, some residents are helping train a generative AI model that will help residents with information about park facilities, trash pick-up schedules or even when the next bingo night for senior citizens will be.

While Amarillo’s generative AI-based digital assistant is among the first in the nation, Gagnon said Emma’s current iteration is only the beginning. Gagnon suggested a future, more advanced Emma might help teach English or other languages to residents at Amarillo public libraries, or could be used to summarize city council meetings and communicate summaries to residents. And a more advanced Emma might proactively engage residents based on their previous inquiries, such as suggesting city programs available to residents who ask about related content. Perhaps, he said, generative AI-based digital assistants might in time help improve the public’s trust in government, which is hovering at all-time lows.

“Our approach is to be a conversational city,” Gagnon said. “We’re in this time of extremely low trust in government, and I don’t see it as any different than a one-on-one relationship, you build relationships through conversations and integrity.”