Southampton City Council recently published a five-year strategy which focuses on making the city greener, fairer and healthier, and ensuring the council is a great place to work and a provider of efficient services.      

“We want to deliver sustainable, inclusive and customer-focused 21st-century public services,” says James Marshall, head of customer and communications at Southampton City Council. “However, we were facing reducing budgets, rising expectations and changing demographics. I believe AI is key to serving our 1.5 million customer requests in a way and at a cost that was not possible before.”

To meet this challenge, Southampton City Council employed the help of ICS.AI. 

“James wanted to transform how Southampton engaged with its citizens; he had seen simple chatbots but felt he needed to go beyond this to deliver Southampton’s vision,” says Martin Neale CEO of ICS.AI. “We worked with James for over a year to produce one of the most sophisticated virtual assistants in the country, SoBot. It is the UK’s first digital assistant to be built against our minimum viable user experience framework, a 22-point framework which ensures digital assistants are ethical, comprehensive and engaging.”   

This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.

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