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Salinas finance committee hears plan to pilot Zen City, CitiBot and Microsoft Copilot
Summary
City staff outlined pilots for three AI tools — Zen City for community feedback, a CitiBot website chatbot, and Microsoft Copilot for staff productivity — with pilots slated for May–June and performance reporting in June–July; committee approved routine minutes.
Carlos Ortega, information systems manager for the City of Salinas, presented an AI implementation plan to the city’s Finance Committee on Jan. 13, 2026, describing three pilot programs and an aggressive timeline for testing and evaluation.
Ortega said the city has selected three platforms for phased implementation: Zen City, a social‑media analytics and sentiment tool; a website chatbot (CitiBot) to provide 24/7 answers and machine translation; and Microsoft Copilot for internal productivity tasks. “Our AI objectives include creating a culture of informed and engaged community to foster collaboration and trust, build purposeful tools to implement meaningful solutions to meet the needs of our community and…
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