Oak Park’s village board has approved a new contract with its digital media services provider that includes a new artificial intelligence chatbot service designed to answer residents’ questions.
The village board approved a new multi-year contract this week with Granicus, a longtime village contractor which provides technology services supporting the village’s website, public meeting broadcasts and more. The new contract is worth over $162,000 in its first year, which includes about $45,000 for installing and licensing 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.”
Two Oak Park’s trustees who have backgrounds as technology professionals — Derek Eder and Cory Wesley — were split on whether or not the tool’s a worthwhile investment.
Eder said he wasn’t convinced the AI tool would save staff’s time and that he felt the feature conflicts with Oak Park’s environmental sustainability and community engagement goals.
“We have a goal in the Climate Ready Oak Park Plan to invest in socially and environmentally responsible IT technology, so this is in direct conflict with that,” Eder said. “If you want to know why your energy bill is going up, its basically because of data centers. That is such a concern that Springfield is debating what to do to regulate that right now, this is a real concern.”
“I want us to be a tech-forward community, but in this particular case an AI bot really goes against the values we espouse as a village around inclusion and being connected with one another. By putting a bot between our residents and our staff, we’re saying ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’”
Wesley said passing on the chatbot tool would not mean that Oak Park would be divested from data centers or their environmental impact, as most of the modern internet is run through largescale data centers. He also said that providing a chatbot service to residents wouldn’t stop residents who wish to communicate with a village staffer directly from doing so.
“If you use Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox you name it, anywhere on the internet you log in and get a service it is all being housed in a data center somewhere,” Wesley said. “I think the chatbot will serve those who aren’t looking to have that interaction with our staff. If you have a quick question, the chatbot will give you a quick answer if it can. If it can’t, then you can pick up the phone.”
The board voted to approve the contract 5-2, with Eder and Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson dissenting. Before voting to approve the deal, Trustee Brian Straw said the village would collect metrics on residents’ satisfaction with the service and then have the option to get rid of the GXA after a year if it didn’t work out. He also said he’d like the village to monitor metrics related to the tool’s energy use and environmental impact.
“We have structured the contract in such a way that we could drop this chatbot in year two if the utility that residents are getting out of it doesn’t outweigh the environmental impact of the technology,” Straw said.
Oak Park’s new deal with Granicus would 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.
The chatbot 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 in December. “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.”
