North Ogden approves one-year pilot of ‘Penny’ AI city information app

The North Ogden City Council approved a one-year pilot agreement with Penny, a conversational artificial-intelligence application designed to centralize city information and answer routine resident questions.

Scott Hess, the city’s community and economic development director, said the pilot would be no-cost for the trial year and that Penny’s developers would help ingest public materials. The company’s representative, Casey Elliott, described the platform as a searchable, app-based central repository of city code, events and routine service information that can answer plain-language questions such as “What day is my garbage pickup?” or “How do I apply for a fence permit?”

Council members sought specifics about implementation, metrics and staff time. Several members said they wanted a staged rollout with a small, demographically broad resident focus group to test accuracy and user experience before any full rollout or procurement. Council member Watson moved to approve the pilot, conditioned on confirmation that the trial would be free and that an implementation plan would be developed; the motion was seconded and passed unanimously.

Staff said their objective is to measure whether Penny reduces repeated routine inquiries to front-line staff and to document potential time savings; the vendor said future pricing options would be determined after the pilot and that an estimated ongoing cost might be about $1 per resident per year but remains under discussion.

The pilot will include ingestion of public-facing documents and meetings minutes; staff and the vendor noted special handling for scanned PDFs and other documents that require optical character recognition (OCR) to ensure accurate indexing. City staff will return to council with an implementation plan and metrics for evaluation.