Artificial intelligence democratization can sometimes feel very far away from the current reality, but in the City of Amarillo, Texas, AI will soon be impacting thousands of residents through a unique collaboration with Dell Technologies Inc.

Dell has partnered with Rich Gagnon (pictured, left), chief information officer of the City of Amarillo, to create a website with a digital human, named Emma, who can help communicate with residents and translate requests, such as how to pay their water bill or what happened during the last city council.

Dell’s Jon Siegal (right) and the City of Amarillo’s Rich Gagnon (second from right) discuss the development of “Emma,” an AI assistant for city residents.

“We have more refugees per capita than any city in Texas — 24% of our residents don’t speak English at home,” said Gagnon, explaining the idea’s origin. “I started playing with models, and I was really impressed with the abilities to translate and thought, ‘Hey, there’s something here.’ Reached out to Dell and said, ‘I have this crazy idea. What if we use generative AI on our website and made that an interface into services?’”

Gagnon and Jon Siegal (right), senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and Savannah Peterson at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the development of Emma and the wide-ranging implications of this technology. (* Disclosure below.)

AI avatar: Introducing Emma to Amarillo residents

The underlying tech for Emma came out of Dell’s partnership with Nvidia Corp. and the company’s ongoing commitment to producing hardware for AI development. As always with AI, the data being fed to it is crucial, especially when creating an avatar that will communicate with residents.

“This is a collaboration between Dell and Nvidia and some of our third party partners as well, and part of our open ecosystem,” Siegal said. “This was really critical here in the early going — and, frankly, still ongoing basis — is helping the community figure out what are the right data sources, how to integrate those data sources into the model … to create that AI avatar interface that’s so unique and so conversational.”

There is a lot of fear around AI, Gagnon recognizes, but he says that the community has been very receptive to Emma’s warm, “sixth-grade teacher”-like persona, especially senior residents who might be looking for companionship.

“Anytime you innovate, whether that’s in a corporate setting, you have to create a safe space to innovate in. When you’re in government, that safe space has to extend out to your residents,” Gagnon said. “Now they’ve embraced the technology, and it’s really fun actually to introduce [Emma] to different groups. Because until you see her, it’s just a concept.”

In the future, Gagnon predicts that Emma will be able to change her appearance based on the cultural background of the resident. The positive response to her has also led Dell to consider other partnerships and other applications for this kind of AI interface.

“There’s a tremendous amount of interest,” Siegal said. “We’ve simplified it and made it a repeatable solution so that other cities can actually streamline the process … we’ve packaged the solution in such a way where now it’s going to be easy to deploy, including on-prem or at the edge.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Dell Technologies World: 

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell  nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE