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\nBy Jason Green, Digital Communications Manager
You may already be familiar with the AI Assistant on SandySpringsGA.gov. As you read this, it’s waiting at the bottom of your screen, ready to help you find information, answer questions, or even summarize this article. And if you choose that last option, no offense taken.
\n\nWith the rapid pace of innovation happening around AI, the City heard from stakeholders that a website AI Assistant would make it easier for people to get answers quickly, in plain language, and at any time of day. City websites contain a large amount of important information, but depending on what someone needs, navigating menus and searching through pages takes time. An AI Assistant provides residents, businesses, and visitors another way to interact with City information—whether they are looking for a service, trying to understand a process, or simply not sure where to start.
\n\nIf you are interested in diving deeper into how the City’s Digital Development Team implemented its AI assistant, this article explores our approach and how it differs from other local government AI projects.
\n\nWe kicked off this project looking for potential private sector partners. The digital services firm, BizzTech was in early stages of developing an AI chatbot called HAL 8122 based on OpenAI's models. After they showed us a demonstration of HAL in action, both parties agreed to enter a no-cost collaboration and see what would come out of it.
\n\nThe initial setup of HAL was straightforward. After spinning up a test environment with a copy of our website, we added a script provided by Bizztech to inject a React-based chat interface into our website and we were ready to begin chatting with the AI—albeit one that didn't know much about Sandy Springs!
\n\nAdministration takes place in Bizztech’s HAL back-end interface, which includes a suite of tools for training the AI and tailoring it to an organization’s needs. There is a knowledgebase where administrators can upload documents and rank their priority from normal to highest. These documents are vectorized to create a database which is the basis of the AI assistant’s knowledge. There is also a tool for uploading your website’s sitemap, which the AI assistant can use to navigate users around the website, and a natural-language programming layer that allows administrators to instruct the AI on how to handle different kinds of requests.
\n\nAdd in a flat pricing model, and on the surface, it looks like a fairly typical AI chatbot software-as-a-service platform. So how was this project different from the approach any other local government might take when implementing a third-party chatbot?
\n\nAt Sandy Springs, we're committed to the concept of identifying and maintaining a source of truth for City information as we strive to maintain an optimal data lifecycle.
\n\nIf the phrase “data lifecycle” is unfamiliar, it refers to how data is created, managed, distributed, maintained, and ultimately analyzed. In Sandy Springs, we think about data in four phases: Planning, Production, Distribution, and Analysis.
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![\"Diagram](\"/sites/default/files/2026-06/Data%20Lifecycle_3840%20x%201343.png\")
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\nThe source of truth is a designated place where a particular City dataset is created and managed. Other systems may make copies of the data, but when the original is updated, downstream systems automatically update as well. Different datasets have different sources of truth. As a rule, we try to make the source of truth a place where City employees are already managing data to maximize efficiency and make it easier for staff to keep information accurate and up to date.
How does all this relate to our AI Assistant?
\n\nWe work hard to avoid asking City employees to maintain the same information in two different places. Not only is that inefficient, but it also increases the likelihood of outdated or inconsistent information. For that reason, the last thing we wanted was to build and maintain a separate knowledge base just for the AI Assistant. Since the assistant lives on the City’s website, it made sense for it to derive its responses from the information that is published there.
\n\nBizzTech provides a back-end tool that could scrape the City’s website nightly and use that information to power the AI Assistant. But during testing, we found two major issues with that approach.
\n\nFirst, the AI Assistant performed better when information was provided through its knowledgebase than when it was gathered through website scraping alone. That is because the knowledgebase content is vectorized, allowing the assistant to surface information that would otherwise not be available within a reasonable respond time.
\n\nSecond, City information can sometimes change far more quickly than a nightly scan can keep up with. During high-traffic events, updates may happen minute by minute. For example, a major event such as our Stars and Stripes Celebration fireworks display may be delayed because of weather. In those moments, thousands of website visitors are looking for the latest information. An AI Assistant relying on content scraped the night before could easily give people outdated guidance at exactly the wrong time.
\n\nFor those reasons, we concluded that BizzTech's knowledgebase was the right foundation—but only if it could be populated automatically with the same content already published on the website. And if that information changed on the site, the version available to the AI assistant would need to change with it.
\n\nFortunately, most of the City's digital public information infrastructure is developed by the Digital Development Team and its private sector partners, so we have complete control over our data. SandySpringsGA.gov is what's known as a static website with its content generated by the City's proprietary Unified Platform content management system. This decoupled CMS is a highly customized and extended instance of the open-source CMS, Drupal and was developed to aggregate City public information and distribute it across a network of websites and digital signage.
\n\nFor this project, the team created a proprietary Drupal module that monitors any webpage, news article, event or place node within Unified Platform that is published to SandySpringsGA.gov. When a node is updated by a City employee, a JSON file is created containing the information that is published to the website in structured data. The JSON file is then pushed to the BizzTech knowledgebase via their API where it replaces any existing knowledgebase article. We also developed triggers to account for new nodes, nodes that are no longer marked to be published to SandySpringsGA.gov or nodes that are archived. For example, there is an automated agent that archives events after they occur, so this action would remove an expired event from the BizzTech knowledgebase.
\n\nThis custom agent, ensures that the AI Assistant's knowledgebase stays completely in sync with the content on SandySpringsGA.gov. Returning to our example of a major event, if an employee were to change the start time of fireworks in Unified Platform, the AI assistant would know about that change about the same time that SandySpringsGA.gov would reflect it.
\n\nPresently, the AI Assistant is relying on a sitemap that was manually uploaded. The problem with this approach is that it won't reflect new webpages published to SandySpringsGA.gov. Bizztech are in the process of adding a function where we will be able to enter the path of our live XML sitemap and the system will periodically ingest the latest version.
\n\nThe AI Assistant was made available to the public on June 17, 2026. The Digital Development Team will monitor its use and continue to collaborate with BizzTech on improving the experience for users.
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