County touts 311 rollout and AI agents; board presses on data governance and outreach

Prince William County officials gave the Board of Supervisors an extended update on the county's 311 platform, reporting the system has handled more than 63,000 interactions across web, mobile, chat and phone channels since going live in May 2025.

Deputy County Executive Alicia Hart introduced Brian Coy (Department of IT) and Katie Hanson (311 operations manager), who reviewed the platform's capabilities and usage statistics. Coy said the county launched an omnichannel platform (web portal, iOS/Android apps, a live call center and an on-page chatbot called "Will") on May 15, 2025, integrated it with EnerGov for Neighborhood Services, and later added a voice AI agent called "Willow" and an email-to-case channel.

Coy provided usage figures: Will (the on-page chatbot) recorded more than 36,000 unique interactions producing 700+ service requests; Willow answered over 5,000 after-hours calls that generated roughly 170 service requests. The live call center has handled about 20,000 calls and submitted over 1,300 service requests on callers' behalf. Web portal use produced over 2,000 service requests; the mobile app has generated roughly 170. All told, staff said the system has generated over 4,500 service requests with agencies closing more than 4,100 of them.

Operations manager Katie Hanson described internal performance metrics: average speed of answer is 13 seconds (better than the 28-second industry standard), and average handling time has been halved since launch. Hanson said the team assembled a knowledge base of roughly 800 public-facing articles at launch and updates it regularly.

Officials also summarized short-term upgrades: a recently completed security/feature release will update the call-center console, make knowledge articles easier for constituents to find, add Spanish-language intake across omnichannels (coming in the "coming weeks"), and create additional SR types (domestic-fowl complaints, separate lost/found animal forms). Staff said they will develop district-level dashboards and overdue-ticket reports for supervisors and chiefs of staff.

During Q&A supervisors pressed staff on AI and data protections. Supervisor Angry asked whether the county's AI tooling risks exposing proprietary data; Coy said the platform uses Salesforce with documented data-governance policies, stores data encrypted at rest and in transit, and does not feed county data to public LLMs used for model training. He said Willow and Will operate inside the county's controlled environment and that routine security upgrades are performed.

Supervisors also raised user-experience issues with Willow's speech recognition and asked whether callers can be routed to a live operator; Coy and the deputy county executive said Willow is being actively developed, will soon include Spanish, and staff is developing a workflow that can offer the AI agent as an option when live-agent wait times are long or to transfer callers to a live agent on request.

Supervisors asked how legacy "general request" tickets will be reclassified once new SR types are added; staff confirmed the operations team can retroactively reclassify earlier general requests into new buckets so dashboards reflect historic trends.

What's next: staff said they will continue rolling out new SR types, publish district dashboards and coordinate communications through County Communications to drive public awareness of the 311 channels and new features.