Oak Park’s village board discussed the potential for the village to sponsor an artificial intelligence tool that could be launched to answer resident questions.
While village staff and company officials said they were confident that the AI tool is designed to never “hallucinate” misinformation, Oak Park’s trustees who have backgrounds as technology professionals were split on the tool’s usefulness at this time.
The chatbot tool could come as part of a new village contract with Granicus, a government digital media services provider that the village has worked with since 2011. While Oak Park currently uses Granicus products to support the village’s website, its public engagement platform “Engage Oak Park,” its email newsletter system, its public meeting video streaming platform and more, a proposed contract renewal with the company would see the village transition from paying individual subscriptions for Granicus products to enrolling in the company’s comprehensive Service Cloud and Operations Cloud programs.
The contract on the table would add a dedicated company liaison to work with village staff along with increased support and training for staff. The board will approve a renewed contract with Granicus as part of a future meeting following further negotiations between the village and the company.
The new contract with the company could include the launch of an AI-powered Government Experience Agent, a public-facing chatbot feature which the company refers to as a “GXA”. The company markets the AI tool as a way for municipalities to accurately answer resident questions without using staff’s time.
“GXA transforms service delivery for governments, providing always-on, precise, consistent and contextually relevant responses to resident questions in easy-to-understand language,” Granicus said in marketing materials for the product. “Unlike commercial AI tools, GXA is tuned to understand government interactions and accesses only approved agency data to deliver the best possible responses, creating better experiences for residents and lighter workloads for staff.”
Oak Park’s new deal with Granicus could pay the company as much as $162,666 in its first year, with the proposed deal running through 2031. Adopting the GXA tool would come with a $15,000 onboarding fee, followed by yearly subscription fees starting at $30,381, according to the company’s proposal.
While some trustees expressed concern over the chat bot providing residents with faulty or incomplete information, village staff and company officials maintain that the chat bot would only give residents answers with information from “fine tuned” village-provided sources. The GXA wouldn’t pull any information from the open web as AI Large Language Models like Chat GPT do, according to village staff.
“It only responds when its confidence score meets a conservatively set threshold, ensuring the information closely matches the user’s question,” Oak Park Chief Communications Officer Dan Yopchick wrote in a memo to the board last month. “This approach minimizes the risk of ‘hallucinations’ and ensures responses remain grounded in verified agency data. GXA’s hallucination rate — the chance of fabricating an answer — is effectively zero. It doesn’t invent information. When errors occur, they usually stem from incomplete or outdated details in the source content, which can lead to missing context for the user. We proactively address these issues during onboarding by reviewing and updating agency content.”
Trustee Derek Eder, whose professional background includes building technology tools for local governments, said he didn’t see the value in including the AI tool as part of the contract renewal.
“I don’t think it makes sense for us to be early adopters on this,” Eder said. “I’m just not convinced it’s going to solve the things we think it’s going to solve. I haven’t seen a super effective chatbot as a customer facing thing.”
“It’s just not proven. I’m not convinced on that piece of this.”
Trustees Jenna Leving Jacobson and Brian Straw shared in Eder’s skepticism on the chatbot.
Trustee Cory Wesley, who has also spent decades working in information technology, said that the AI tool is soundly designed and meets Oak Park’s needs. He said that he did his best to “break” a version of the chatbot provided to trustees but found that the safeguards kept it from answering his questions with bad information.
“Our website is great, but it’s old school and the world’s changing,” Wesley said. “This is easy, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll shut it off, tweak it and bring it back. That’s how tech works; it’s never going to be perfect, but this is damn good and we should buy it.”
