Business leaders don’t often look to government for best practices in scaling AI. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Amarillo, Texas, where an AI-powered digital assistant has become the world’s first public-facing municipal AI digital human — making Amarillo a global leader in highly personalized customer service, delivered responsively in real time.
Emma, the city’s AI digital assistant and the digital front door to city services, has been answering around 5,000 questions a month, allowing the city to save $1.8 million earmarked for call-center expansion. In other words, the project combined the two AI milestones enterprise leaders crave most: scale and ROI.
Proof of Amarillo’s high-performing AI infrastructure has helped attract billions in economic investment, said Rich Gagnon, assistant city manager and chief technology officer.
“Most cities don’t think about things like first-mover advantage,” Gagnon said. “That’s very much a commercial concept. But it exists in cities. As an IT organization, how do you absorb that and be responsible while also moving fast?”
Real-time digital human rendering at scale
For Gagnon, the answer was turning to the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, Dell Professional Services, and Uneeq — a collaboration that helped Amarillo turn an ambitious concept into an operating model.
A diverse city in the Texas Panhandle, Amarillo sought to streamline how residents accessed services in a way that served citizens across cultures and languages.
Amarillo was thoughtful in establishing a human-first approach to implementing AI. The city partnered with Digital Rights House Amsterdam to develop a Digital Dignity and Rights Ordinance. The ordinance was adopted by Amarillo’s city council and helped build public trust before deployment.
Gagnon’s original vision was to base the digital assistant on a real human, filmed and animated with AI.
Turning to Dell Services for project design guidance and beta-testing expertise, Gagnon experienced two crucial aha moments. The first was that people preferred a digitally rendered human — they didn’t want to have to guess if they were seeing AI. Also, the assistant needed access to a vector database powered by a streamlined government website.
Acting on Dell’s advice, Gagnon and the Office of Engagement and Innovation recognized that Emma’s success would depend on the quality of information she sources. The team accelerated the development of a full content transformation, resulting in a new website focused on clean data and conversational information. This created the foundation of knowledge for Emma — her source of truth.
Accelerating adoption with Dell AI Factory with Nvidia
The city is currently rebuilding its entire digital network around specialized Dell and Nvidia computing infrastructure to become an AI-centered organization.
“We knew the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia was the right partner because they’ve been part of our innovation program from the start,” Gagnon said. This deep integration was critical to mapping needs to solutions and ramping quickly, with Emma launching 24 months earlier than forecast.
One face, many services
Emma serves as a digital concierge, creating a near-zero-click experience that connects residents directly to answers from the homepage. Rather than requiring users to navigate menus, Emma provides conversational responses based on information from the city’s website.
This is above and beyond the original ROI Gagnon attached to Emma: the deferment of a planned $1.8 million expansion of the city’s 311 call center, once the assistant resolved so many queries that extra help was no longer needed. After launch, the user approval rating exceeded 90%, demonstrating strong adoption and trust. Every interaction informs city leaders’ decisions about improving existing services or developing new ones.
“We’re seeing her have an impact across the board,” Gagnon said.
Amarillo’s roadmap for Emma
Gagnon’s roadmap calls for several versions of Emma across different hardware types, each purpose-built: a wayfinding kiosk at city hall, an airport unit for non-English speakers, a Civic Center terminal that can ask visitors how their event went, and more. Internal agentic workloads — permit request status, form completion, and interdepartmental system collaboration — are moving on-premises to tighten data control and make costs more predictable.
The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia is not just an enterprise AI solution, Gagnon says — it’s also a mindset about transformation. The AI factory concept Dell showed him has reshaped how the city itself operates. Amarillo now runs an innovation team that develops prototype products from departments, an engagement team that collects feedback from residents, and a project management office that ships the result.
“What I’ve found in Amarillo is we’re small enough to be nimble, but we’re big enough you can build a model off us,” Gagnon said. “We’ve sent a message that we can be innovative in a way you’re comfortable with.”
Learn more about how Dell AI Factory with Nvidia delivers secure, customizable solutions for business.
This sponsored post was created by BI Studios with the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia.
