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Municipal Technology Committee advances website overhaul, AI chatbot and automation pilots
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Summary
Members of the Town of Southborough Municipal Technology Committee recommended a Phase 2 overhaul of the town website, pursuing chatbot/agent pilots and prioritizing simple automation of manual workflows; staff to pursue next steps with vendors and internal stakeholders.
The Municipal Technology Committee met to review a redraft of its strategic plan and identified three near-term technology priorities: a Phase 2 upgrade of the town website, piloting AI chatbots/agents to surface meeting information for residents, and automating routine clerical workflows.
Committee members said the website work should include folding smaller department pages — such as the senior center’s — into a responsive, town-hosted site and exploring CivicPlus professional services to address usability gaps. The draft strategic plan also proposes creating a self-service chatbot or agent to let residents ask natural-language questions about meetings and subscribe to topic-based alerts, and recommends pilot projects to automate the top three manual processes in town operations.
The plan’s author asked members to review a newly distributed draft before the next meeting. Committee members agreed to pursue basic steps first: standardizing how meetings and agendas are posted so third-party chatbots or citizen agents can consume the data; investigating CivicPlus’s chatbot offering; and checking vendor options that surfaced after the committee’s in-person meeting.
The committee discussed implementation questions including who would pay ongoing costs for personalized agents and whether the town should supply only raw data while private vendors or individual users would run the agents. One member recommended the town start by improving how it publishes and structures meeting data so other tools can reliably consume it, then decide later whether the municipality should fund agent services.
Committee members also discussed internet-of-things and facilities work under way. Facilities staff were reported to have deployed automated temperature controls and motion-sensor lighting in many town buildings; the committee identified energy-efficiency monitoring and small IoT pilots as an additional, lower-priority goal that could complement the website and automation work.
Next steps logged in the meeting include staff outreach to CivicPlus to learn about its chatbot module and internal follow-up with the facilities director and other department liaisons to scope pilots and identify where simple digital workflows could replace current email-based processes.
