#241: Pilots De-Risk AI — They Don't Scale It | City of Avondale & Polimorphic
The Public Sector Show by TechTablesShow Notes
Earlier this year I sat down at the inaugural WRITA spring conference with Jeff Scheetz (CIO, City of Avondale) and Zach Duguid (AI Engineering Manager, Polimorphic).
Jeff's answer to what he'd put in front of a room of local government CIOs isn't a success story.
It's the horror stories — the scary stuff nobody puts in the press release.
Most of this episode is the unglamorous work that prevents it. Zach walked through what Polimorphic does before an agent ever answers a resident: a Knowledge Base Health Check that seeds up to 500 questions against a city's own content, then reruns them weekly or monthly to confirm what the agent answers and which sources it pulled from.
We also talked about: Why pilots de-risk AI and then stall before they scale across departments Single sign-on inside the city, four or five logins outside it Jeff's next 18 months: consolidate, standardize, clean up after the growth Timestamps 01:55 "I just got a new dog. How do I register him?" — the AI answers, then files the form 03:43 "We're not selling services. There's no checkout cart." So what is a city website for? 04:55 The caller doesn't know the address. They know the coffee shop. The map does the rest. 07:24 A water outage in Utah, live on the phone line the moment staff post it 09:14 Single sign-on inside the city. 4-5 logins outside it. Nobody's solved this. 10:22 30-40 departments, each with its own process — and the war against too many toggles 11:47 19 years in: how much security pain can you inflict before staff route around you? 12:56 "We had to move very quickly for years. Now we finally get to go clean it up." 14:14 Your chatbot is quoting agenda minutes from a decade ago — the check that catches it first 16:30 A 20-year employee retires. Where does the knowledge go, and can AI hold it? 18:18 Pilots de-risk AI. They don't scale it. Why Zach wants it treated as infrastructure. 19:28 Jeff's ask for the roundtable: not the AI wins, the horror stories
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