The PIO Podcast
The PIO Podcast is a platform for Public Information Officers (PIO's) and Public Affairs Officers (PAO's) in public sector organizations, including Police, Fire, EMS, FEMA, state, local, and federal government organizations. The podcast aims to facilitate learning, growth, and discussion of issues that PIO's/PAO's may encounter within their profession. If you would like to support the podcast and connect with other PIO's/PAO's, please email us at thepiopodcast@gmail.com.
The PIO Podcast
S4 - E36; Parth Shah, CEO, Polimorphic
Summary
In this episode, Parth Shah, CEO of Polimorphic, discusses the transformative role of AI in government communications and public service. He shares insights from his background in civic technology and the challenges faced by public agencies in managing communications, public records, and community engagement. Parth emphasizes the importance of AI in enhancing customer service, addressing misinformation, and improving accessibility for diverse populations. He also highlights the need for governments to adapt to technological advancements to meet rising public expectations and maintain effective service delivery.
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Welcome to the PIO Podcast, a place for all things public information related, for police, fire, EMS, and local governments. An open forum to learn, grow, and develop your public information skills. I am your host, Robert Tornabene. I am a public information officer with over 17 years of experience in the field and 27 years of law enforcement background. Weekly, we will delve into the field of public information by talking to other PIOs just like you. Thank you for the support of the podcast. So sit back and enjoy this episode. Good afternoon today on the PIO podcast. I would like to introduce Parth Shah. He's a CEO of Polymorphic. Parth, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01:I'm excited about this conversation.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so am I, Parth. I'm very excited about it. You know, I was looking at your background and I want to talk a little bit about it first off. So you are the co-founder and the CEO of Polymorphic, which is a civic technology company that leverages artificial intelligence. And I have been talking about AI for quite a while, specifically in the government field and in public communications. So we're going to talk a lot about this and what Polymorphic might be able to help PIOs with. But I also wanted to go back to your background a little bit here. So you got a bachelor's degree from MIT, where you co-founded another thing called Flux. What was that? that about?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so while I was on campus, one thing that was really exciting is a lot of folks there were working on projects in the side. And usually, as they were looking to graduate, you know, they would start that maybe their senior year or as they were in graduate school doing their master's engineering. And what's challenging is when you're a full time student, it's really hard to be able to do kind of all the other pieces that are needed to make a startup run, right? All the operations. work that goes into it and so that was really the whole idea was it was kind of an accelerator is what we called it but the the real piece was a way to just help folks as they're trying to get stuff off the ground like if you need to do market research or create um oftentimes getting the initial incorporation we we had a folks at the bu law clinic we'd work with so things like that so it was a pretty exciting initiative and a few really exciting companies pop out out of that.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. So besides starting your own company now, but you also worked as a deep learning software engineer at NVIDIA, which my son loves the video cards that they produce. So awesome. But you also served as a research assistant at Stony Brook University Lab for Computational Neurodiagnostics. Holy
SPEAKER_01:cow. Yeah, that was well before I got into the world of engineering. But it was pretty fun experience. Basically, a lot of stuff around neuroscience and neurodiagnostics. As MRIs became more popular to do research and ways to collect information, the whole idea was, can we run interesting conversations and experiments around that? And so, yeah, I spent some time there. And then, obviously, NVIDIA spent some time on their data platform team, which was pretty cool. And those are two, I think, really fascinating experiences in that world.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's very cool. And I also saw that just this year, you were named New York's who's who in emerging tech on the emerging tech list. So congratulations on that as well.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Yeah, that one, that one was a pleasant surprise.
SPEAKER_02:All right. So let's talk about polymorphy. Let's talk about this. So what inspired you to create this and, and how does it help public agencies improve their communications?
SPEAKER_01:Great question. So I'll actually start with the previous experience before polymorphic was kind of twofold. So I spent some time at a a smaller company that was in the smart city space. And as part of that, I got a great chance to interact with some cities, including a lot of ones in the greater Boston area while I was living there. And the whole idea around smart cities was, can we use data and analytics to really build safer, more vibrant cities? Really exciting initiatives continue to this day. But as I spent time with a lot of the government there, what was really... kind of immediately clear that the biggest challenge was around, in a broad sense, communications and customer service, right? That's the piece that a lot of folks who are not in the world of government don't really understand, which is government might be the most complicated customer service organization in the world, frankly. You take even the smallest city and they're running 15 different departments, right? So when people, I've been at this conference this week, it's been great, but as people have mentioned, oh, you know, sometimes people ask us how do we run it like a business and what they're thinking is a small business right the local laundromat or something like that but the city's got utilities and public works and you know planning and zoning and they're completely different they don't even have very similar operations but the thing that ties it all together is customer service so what I had seen was how challenging it was to do customer service right so a lot of and this is the part of our world that we're really focused on the communications PIO side and I'll get to that. But what I was seeing was 50% of the time front desk was spending was on repeat questions that were calls that people were making because they couldn't find content on the website. Another 25% of time was just status requests, right? I had called earlier and I just want to know where in the process I am now. And then you go on the inside and a lot of the, even if certain stuff is digitized internally, a lot of it's very manual. And so I think about this idea a lot and there's this really tweet and I'm not I don't spend a ton of time on tour but there's this there's this tweet that came out that said hey I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do art and writing and and that really resonated with me because I really I think that was I was thinking from the government lens which is if we're a customer service organization right most cities counties state agencies most time is being spent on laundry and dishes right now it's the laundry and dishes of customer service and so One of the leads with Polymorphic is we do some really exciting stuff for an AI. We call it an AI concierge, which is, it's a chatbot for the website. We also have an AI search. We have it on the phone system, so it can answer calls in 28 different languages. Instead of the phone trees, it'll actually route to your department. So happy to kind of dive in more there. But we also have an email, SMS, so every way your residents can reach out to you and have questions. It acts as that concierge experience has your website content, your codes. It's similar to what people are used to with ChatGPT right now, except it's controlled content. So it's only your content and it's much easier to manage that way.
SPEAKER_02:So Parth, are you still seeing... So websites for government agencies are horrendous. And I used to manage one when I was still working for government. And
SPEAKER_00:I'll tell you,
SPEAKER_02:trying to get information updated on there is like getting an act of God. At the same time, you want to try and give information to the public but you can't get the accurate information in the system so how how does polymorphic handle that are you guys getting access to all their systems and then you're it just finds it and then pulls it in
SPEAKER_01:yeah i mean that's that's the big idea we really want to make the process easy for for a lot of communications and pio um departments because you know you're updating the website and if i have to upload every piece of content into also the AI that's too difficult. So basically our approach is we'll automatically run through the website, the code, all those sources. What's neat though too is what we'll do with a lot of our customers is they actually use the tool to do an audit of their content because it's so much easier to ask, hey, here are the common questions we get from constituents. So we have this funny story where a village in Wisconsin we work with, they were asking some of their common questions and one of their questions was who is the police chief, right? And I came up with the old police chief, which was the police chief from, you know, two, three years ago. And the first instinct was, okay, you know, maybe the AI is wrong. I don't know. And then they click through the sources, right? Because our chatbot, our voice, you know, it's got all the sources behind and you get a full log. So it gives a full audit trail, which is great. It clicked through the sources. And lo and behold, they hadn't updated their police department page in like three years. And so that's kind of the thing that I mean, obviously, that's a more benign example, because more personnel, but you can think about people are going to your site already. And I think it's really hard to float up what content might be off. So in many ways, we started to see it used as a tool actually, right internal staff to figure out, hey, for key questions we're getting, you know, where's our content up to date, and we're actually working on potentially a really neat tool soon, which will probably provide free of charge or something like that to cities is kind of a website checker. Where is your website conflicting to kind of do a readiness for using our AI chatbots and voice even more effectively?
SPEAKER_02:So as an end user, as a front user and a back user, I've handled them both ways. So it's interesting. So when I look at the things that people would come in and I did the FAQ thing many years ago because FAQs I thought were very helpful. The problem is it's only, an FAQ is only as good as a query that the person puts in. So if they can't figure out what they're trying to get to, they can't find it. So AI has definitely made life a little easier because it at least, give what is probably the closest answer as opposed to what we might come up with on our own. But what I've also found is that information that the agencies have on their websites, like you said, the chief of police in one agency, I still see three agencies I go back checking, they still have the place card with the chief's message and it's from 10 years ago. And it's just a holding card No picture, no email address, no ability to contact anybody. So as I see this, and I know agencies struggle with this, they want everybody to come back to their website, but their website just doesn't have the oomph that it needs to do or handle the bandwidth too.
SPEAKER_01:And so, I mean, there's two pieces of that that we really get keyed in on. So the first part I think you mentioned is great, right? So you've gone through the whole process here and added FAQs as a way to make it more... just easier for the common questions folks ask, but I'll give you a simple example of why AI becomes so valuable, right? A lot of folks will like put common questions about the code and they'll say, Hey, if you have a short-term rental, like here's the guidance, right? The problem is most people might not know the term short-term rental, right? They might say, I have a Vrbo or I have an Airbnb. What do I do, right? And so the neat thing about AI versus these search tools, the search or legacy chatbots that used to be more keyword-oriented where you had to program every response in is what AI is doing is it's not just saying, here, give me your content. I'm going to understand the meaning of it. And I'm also going to understand the meaning of the question, right? So I know Airbnb is short-term rental. I know Vrbo is short-term rental. Your code's going to reference it not as Airbnb or Vrbo. They're going to say short-term rentals, right? And so that's part one, right? That's where AI, like more concretely, the reason I love that example is it's just such a common, everyone has run into that, but it's government speak is very different from the way your residents think, right? They don't even think in departments, right?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So that's a whole other thing on phones.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And that's another thing. You brought this up earlier. You talked about they don't know where they're at in the queue. They don't know. They've not gotten any updates. And what I've seen in law enforcement agencies that used to government, because I was involved in both aspects, people change. They leave positions. They leave suddenly or they're out on a medical and it's sitting on somebody's desk. You know, where's my... FOIA was the one that was the most important one for PIOs. And if a FOIA case got dropped, you could end up in some sanctions for from the district attorney's office because you failed to meet the burden of time limits. Let's talk about that. How does that
SPEAKER_01:help? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So that's the second side of our system, right? So we've got the AI concierge and the AI concierge starts to funnel into what we call like our constituent relationship management, but it's really like a customer service platform, right? So you can submit stuff online, track it online and give staff tools. So one of the counties in North Carolina we work with, this is Exact Challenge. public records request is the big use case your communications department has. That's a great point on, one, the requirements. There's time limits by which you need to get back. Oftentimes, people just file the extension right away because they just know that it's going to be so long to get back when it's handled manually. The other piece I'll even point out is the coordinating with other departments. This is a larger county where they have 30 departments. So the public records requests might come in through communications, but communications and the PIO need to coordinate with all these other different departments on depending on the request where to get the information from. And so that's actually non-trivial. How does that happen right now? Mostly email, right? You forward an email and there's no due date on emails, right? Conceptually, there's no due date on emails, but your FOIA request has a deadline. So what we have there, which is pretty great, it's an online service. a mission, but there's also a way to build out those internal workflows on the back end. So this county, basically, the communications office, you know, someone asks, how do I do a public records request? The AI answers it, it points them to that online form they're using polymorphic for. They fill it out, all the requests, and it goes to communications. The great thing is they have, if someone's out of the office, no problem, because it's done at a department level. So it gets assigned to multiple folks with a due date, so it'll bump someone else, it can get escalated automatically, and then they'll say, okay, I need, you know, public works, solid waste, and the sheriff on this one, right? And they can assign it to three different departments. It's all organized in an internal kind of case management view right so it's all organized in one place they can keep track of they can send emails from it too so if they want to do emails they can do that but they can have tasks so they can assign a task saying hey sheriff i need these documents back in you know we have 20 days to fulfill you have 15 days to do that so it organizes everything and then they can look back you know you go back two years and say hey you know we got this kind of request what how do we fulfill it and so you have that full history as well um and so that's been great i mean i think leadership's loved it too because they can and see where the bottlenecks are in the process too. Because it does automatic analytics on, hey, communications is doing everything in two days, but our departments are taking three, four days to get back. And suddenly that has a lot of value as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. I can definitely see that. And I, and I've known this from early on when I started my career, we, I handled FOIA, everything was manually do an email, you sent an email, um, and, and you're waiting for the person to get back to you. Then you, you know, you hope you get the record in time and then how do you deliver the record? So I'm assuming polymorphic helps get the record digitally to somebody as well.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. That's right. So you can submit it back digitally. If you're on an email, you can do that as well. But you know, we've got the full workflow online. so I can, you know, get them the status, they can download the documentation all there. So, this makes that whole process seamless for public records requests and it's a general workflow tool. So that's a neat thing, right? It doesn't, it's not just limited to public records requests, but a lot of folks use it that way and then other departments are also using polymorphic in human services and other places and so it makes it easier too for those departments because they're familiar with polymorphic software for other stuff they do so it also makes them faster at responding to those public records requests that are coming from human
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SPEAKER_02:now, back to the show. Right. All right, so I'm going to geek out on a different level here for you, Parth. Roads are big things for people, roads and maintenance and things like that. And, you know, they'll drive down the road one day and all of a sudden they've got a truck out there and they're digging up the road because a water main broke. And, you know, and it happens. There's one road I know where about every couple weeks a water main breaks and it just keeps moving down the road. And I'm thinking at some point, is somebody going to say we need to replace that whole pipe all the way down instead of keep doing the sectioning and paying the overtime? So I would assume polymorphic could also work within a department like their public works department and, and track how old, a sewer pipe is and when it's expected to fail. The expectation time of a failure.
SPEAKER_01:That piece is probably more on the asset management side, but what we do on that side, which is pretty neat, is let's say you want to report an issue like that, or they want to track the process by which they fix it. For public works, potholes, broken pipes, street signs down, street lights not working. Those are all common use cases where, hey, I see it. How do I, how do I report it? And so people can do that in polymorphic. What's neat about the water main break, which is actually funny. And this is a tool communications folks love because I remember at the behind the scenes were for staff or a CRM for the public where I AI concierge online submission, right? Uh, Behind the scenes, because we're starting to also collect with every interaction, hey, you know, someone submitted this, this is a request. The water main break is a funny example because communicating that normally is difficult, right? Because it's a geographic fence I want to communicate it, right? Not everyone needs to know about the water main break. It's just the piece of the street that's affected. And so what's neat is as you start to build up that CRM contact book, we have this feature where you can actually draw a map They'll pull down the contacts and you can send a mass email to them saying, hey, the water main broke. We're working on fixing it without having to send an email to everyone. And while also being able to respond to that with the mass communication.
SPEAKER_02:That's definitely a nice feature to have that ability. And I would think that in a crisis communication respect, that would be valuable as well for public safety, law enforcement, fire department, EMS.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:Parth, let's talk about data, AI and public messaging. Misinformation is a big issue for PIOs and, you know, getting to it to try and dispel it quickly is really important, especially on social media. Can polymorphic help agencies detect and counter it in any way? Does it have a tool for that?
SPEAKER_01:So we don't have a tool on like the detect side necessarily. I mean, that's a good idea. It might be something that we could help out with. We might need to think about that. So I'll go back to my engineering team with that. But one thing that is, you know, great is, we talked about kind of the AI concierge piece, right? And I mentioned there's a chatbot on the website, on the phone system. Social media is another big way folks reach out. And one thing that we do is because we're open API, we can integrate into the social media piece there. So if people are sending, you know, messages to your page or, you know, DMs to your Twitter about, hey, you know, I saw this, you know, is this real or whatever? You can leverage that AI, which is online, that controlled content, right? And it can provide that first response. So that's something that we're very excited about. I think misinformation is a huge challenge for communications departments. There's going to be many pieces of that battle to fight. I'll give another example that's not on the social media side, but you see all these... you know, Google search is rolling out that AI assist, right? And we work with the surrogate court in New Jersey and they're saying, well, the Google answer on like how I probate a will is wrong. And I said, why is that? And they said, well, they're pulling from sources that are not just the government. Like it depends, right? In different counties, the rules are different. In different states, the rules are different. So that's a challenge from a misinformation standpoint. So that's what motivated them to do the chatbot, the AI search because they're like, this is our branded, controlled content AI answer.
SPEAKER_02:That's understandable. Parth, agencies often struggle with accessibility and language barriers. How does polymorphic, I know you said something about language that can respond back, how does it communicate across the different languages and, of course, accessibility issues as well?
SPEAKER_01:I'll answer those in two parts because they're related. I think there's different elements to both. The language piece, We support 75 different languages. We're adding more every day on the chatbot. It's been incredible. I've seen folks have... Our customers have told us they had full conversations with languages that previously they didn't have anyone on staff who could actually speak those. So there's a county we work with where they have... Most staff has English and some folks know Spanish. They have a huge Bengali population. So So if you're Bengali and trying to get services in this community, to no fault of the county, it's just difficult, right? None of the staff knows how to speak that. They rolled out this AI and all of a sudden, there's just people asking questions in Bengali. We saw this full conversation someone had about, and it started very generic, right? So there's like the surrogate court, which handles wills of states, things like that. And they opened with a super generic question of like, hey, you know, a loved one just passed away, what do I do? And it walked the through the whole process like, hey, do you have a will or not? It was an incredible example, honestly. And for that county, it was, hey, we're opening up service to so many new residents that we didn't even know weren't able to access our services because of that language barrier. So that's part one. The accessibility piece goes even beyond that. We work with a lot of communities in Colorado. Colorado, obviously, they pulled forward the ADA accessibility mandates forward. It was supposed to be last year. I think they got an extension a little bit on it. It was really interesting to see the challenge a lot of them were facing with content because PDFs, I think, are the number one culprit around accessibility right so you have the choice between could i remediate do i remediate my pdfs which frankly is very expensive right it is the cost per page is almost prohibitive if you're a smaller city if you're a larger organization you just have too many pdfs so at regardless of what scale you are remediating pdfs is difficult so they're faced between the choice of archiving them right um or taking them down in a lot of cases and there's a lot of valuable information in there that you know residents and businesses and want to ask and learn about. Or they keep it up and risk lawsuits and noncompliance. And so you're caught between a rock and a hard place in the most literal definition. What we did with Castle Pines is amazing. We put out a case study on it. They've been an amazing team there, really innovative in Colorado. They actually use the AI. And beyond website and code sources, you can upload internal knowledge base, PDF, that kind of stuff. And so they uploaded their documents. and then took them down from the website. But what they told the public is, you can ask questions, and we'll still pull the content from there. So we're not taking down any information. So you interact with the chatbot, AI search, we'll still answer questions based on those PDFs. But now it's actually accessible. And so our chatbot and search is obviously, you know, WCAG level, AA compliant. And And so that was a great example of actually we hadn't even thought about that. We worked with PDFs because that's just another big content piece that the chatbots and search and AI voice systems need to pull from. They actually did something very clever where they actually used it to make sure that they could provide the answers and get compliant in that process. So we're part of the equation. I'm not saying we're the magic bullet for, hey, you sign up with Polymorphic, you're ADA compliant. But with the website content piece, That is a big challenge, right? Am I going to take down a ton of information that's very valuable or do I keep it up and risk noncompliance? And we're helping a lot of folks in Colorado and other states do that.
SPEAKER_02:Let's talk about what polymorphic the agencies you can work with. Small to how large? What can you guys work with?
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, we work a pretty wide range. Our largest, we have state agencies. We have counties that are millions of residents. So some really, really large organizations. But we've done a pretty conscious effort to work with small and mid-sized organizations as well. So I would say our sweet spot is 20 or 10 to 20,000 residents and higher. But that's not to say one of our best customers, we just did a great customer video. Tangent Oregon is 1300 residents. And we really care about making sure our technology is also accessible to smaller cities. It's a different challenge, right? In their case, they had three full-time employees, right? And one was retiring. So you think about the institutional knowledge that's disappearing. They're about to lose 33% of their institutional knowledge. And so that's where we're really excited about AI and customer services. We really believe it's a force multiplier. It's an investment in your existing staff. Right now, hiring is so difficult in government. I think I started the numbers. It's like 52% of local and state employees are thinking in the next five to 10 years, they're going to retire. And that is a shocking future reality to deal with. So how are we going to provide the existing level service, I would argue better service because constituents are demanding more and more. They're used to Amazon gives me package tracking, Domino's gives me SaaS tracking. I can chat 24-7 in 75 languages. I want that with my government. The demands are rising and I might have half the staff to do that in 5-10 years. The refill rate is just not happening. That is what we're really passionate about. We want to make sure governments are prepared. we want governments to be known as the best customer service organizations out there. Our, our internal vision and motto we say is I want, you know, a lot of day, a lot of right now people, we, we opened this conversation with people say, Oh, I want to run like a business. And I don't want to flip that on his head. I want people to be going to their, you know, local car dealer or laundromat and say, Hey, why, why can't you run like the city? Why can't you run like the county? Cause they're using all this innovative technology and the customer service is so great. And so long way of saying, um, Thank you. It's a big challenge. And I think that's something that staffing is going to be a really, really big piece of it.
SPEAKER_02:Have you, have you seen in the, in your experience with pitching this to government, the, the governments that are they coming to you? Are you guys going out there and throwing it out to them and saying, Hey, this, this might be beneficial to you, but where do you see where you, I should say, where do you see you run into the, the wall with local government?
SPEAKER_01:So I think, I think it were AI is AI was new. So the, this has changed a little bit over the last year, right? We've become, I would say, and this is all a shout out to our engineering team and our client success team, like they've really built probably the most well-tailored AI product for customer service and government, right? They've done a fantastic job working with our customers there. So a lot of it is more around actually education, right? When it's something new for governments, a lot of folks don't realize how AI could help some of the problems they're facing, right? Right now, if you asked every city manager, every county manager, even communications department, what's your number one problem? What keeps you up at night? It's staffing, right? It's really hard to hire. How do we provide services? That doesn't mean necessarily you're thinking about the solution, right? Everyone thinks in the problem. And our job is to communicate how we can help with those problems, right? Staffing shortages, department silos, resident frustration, increase in expectations of customer service and that demand coming from the population. So in states now where we've started to see you know a lot of counties hop on like New Jersey we're at we cover a third of the state already North Carolina will be at 25% of the residents will be covered by polymorphic services over 30 million Americans are covered by governments using polymorphic so we've got you know a lot of folks using us and people are saying hey I want that but that's a big part of it right is us getting the message out I think where we run into resistance a lot of times folks they sometimes think of AIA as a replacement, or they think of AI as... And this idea of like, oh, it's not a person, right? And I kind of challenge folks to think about it differently, actually, which is that example I mentioned earlier with the multi-language. That's a new outcome and a new constituency they're able to serve. It's not about replacing, it's about value add, right? When we talked about the AI, I want to do the laundry and dishes. I think that people realize this, especially city managers I've talked to, Take front desk roles. The turnover is usually in a year. The folks are handling the phone calls, right? Either they get promoted or they get frustrated. And I think we had to ask ourselves, hey, if you're answering the same questions over and over again, is that a fun and exciting job that we are doing in government? No, it's not. And so I think we need to think about the employee experience, right? The staff experience. If we are having a hard time hiring, we're having a hard time retaining, people, government's got an amazing mission, right? I think right now, younger folks too are really excited about mission, right? That's something that matters to them. Local government, state government is probably the most impactful organization in our lives. I would argue that, okay? But the experience internally doesn't match up if I'm spending all my time answering repeat questions on the phone. If I'm spending time on the pen and paper, we're taking stuff on email and trying to forward these 50 email long forwarding chains to fulfill a public records request. So that's our job, right? It's the education piece. But I think that's where we see some resistance, right? Where folks are just, they don't know, right? They hear AI as a buzzword. They're like, what does it mean for my government? What can I do there? And so that's the gap that we're trying to break.
SPEAKER_02:And I know it's tough. And I've seen this with, just in the public sector, public information officers with the use of AI, not realizing there's benefits to it. And again, it's about 50-50 right now. Some people are like, no, I don't want to use it. I don't think it's good. It's not of value to me. And the reality of it is there is value in it if you open your mind up and think about what it can help you do. Because for me, as a PIO, I want to be able to do as many things as I possibly can. And without that ability, without having ChatGPT to help me solve some minor tasks or solve problems or give me direction when I'm looking for like an angle on a story and I'm trying to make sure I covered all the bases, but I'm not sure. And I ask AI to analyze it and they say, oh yeah, you missed this and this. That just saved me like a week of trying to figure it out, if not more. And I think AI, one of the things that government needs to realize is AI is there. It makes everything feel faster. It makes everything more efficient. And it lets you focus on the piece. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:100%. It makes everything faster. I think that's a great point. And the thing I ask a lot of folks, I hear that. And the other thing I hear is, oh, let's wait, right? Like, let's wait to figure out on AI what to do. And what I tell people in response is in three years, or two years, even using chatbots and AI on the phone will be the common way most people interact and interface with the private sector and a lot of governments so so the question is if that's inevitable right what what's the wait for right uh and so that's that's why i tell folks right obviously we're in that space um we're not saying it has to be with us but i my point is you really got to take it seriously because you don't want to fall behind right and and i think with any new innovation governments are generally hey we don't want to be first now with you know a lot of stuff we're doing a lot of people have already done it right we're talking about 200 departments 30 million Americans are covered by this. Um, they're used to this experience. What you, what you don't want to be is last, right? And I think that's a big concern for councils and city managers because that's where your residents get really frustrating, right? They see the neighbors and say, Hey, the experience right there is so good. And the problem with city and counties is you kind of have a monopoly on, on your residents. So it's really important to provide great service because otherwise they'll get frustrated, right? Cause they don't have as much ease and Hey, I can just get up and leave. And so, um, And that's why I'm so passionate about customer service. And I think a lot of our governments are too.
SPEAKER_02:And I agree. And so if somebody, if somebody wants to reach out to you guys and learn more about what you do or how you do it, and I'll, I'll let you throw their pitch out at the very end when we're done, but what's it? And no, no, I honestly, I believe it. I look at your product and I'm like, this is what a lot of governments need. They really do. And like you said, the, the, being last is the worst thing in the world for local government now you need to be an innovator and this is an innovative piece of technology and we it needs to be promoted out there it needs to be pushed so I believe me I'm 100% behind you on this but if somebody wants to reach out and connect with somebody at polymorphic what do they got to do
SPEAKER_01:well it's super easy so the website's a great place to go it's p-o-l-i-m-o-r-p-h-i-c.com you go there, there's a button at the top, big blue button, request a demo, right? And we'll ask for what region you're in. What's great is we got an amazing team covering kind of the different regions. So they got experience with your neighbors, folks who've had similar challenges. So we talked about like Castle Pines in Colorado. We just brought on another one in Colorado, Littleton, great team there. So if you're in Colorado, you get someone who's actually worked with Colorado municipalities. Kate on our team is fantastic. She'll walk you through that. So reach out to that way. We'll get you in front of the right folks. You can email me directly, too, if you want. If you just want to talk AI, I'm always happy to. I really like to make myself accessible. My email is just my first name, parth, P-A-R-T-H, at polymorphic.com. Those are the two best ways to reach out. We're on LinkedIn. I think the website's a great place. If it's just, hey, I want to learn more about AI.
SPEAKER_02:I'll add those into the show note, and I'll make sure that they pop up when we do the video and stuff. So definitely want to promote that. So Parth, let's switch this up. Before we go into rapid fire, I'm going to ask you this. Is there a question I should have asked? And if so, how would you have answered?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's a good question. I think the questions you covered were fantastic. The one that I just like to bring attention to is around, you know, we've been talking a lot about technology and AI. And the one I think it's good to ask is just how hard is it to get set up, right? So even if it's great, we're talking about everyone's going to do it, what's the effort it takes to get this set up? Because people are used to, when you think technology implementations, they think ERP. They think the finance system ERP, it's like a two-year project, huge headache, it's super difficult. We've really thought about that experience a lot because of that. I think people are often, a lot of the reason people are hesitant on new technology is just they're so scarred by these old legacy technology where it took forever to implement and it was super painful. So what's really neat is we made that really easy. Like we were talking about the website integrations and all that. So we've done the heavy lifting on our side. people go live within two to three calls with our team and so we're talking a total investment of three to four hours max for the the chatbot on the site um which is you know i highlight that because it's just so different from other technologies so i i really say when obviously the crm and the workflow piece that's more involved we sit down with the team and you know really hold folks hands to like figure out what the workflow is the process but for getting started with ai it is easy. It doesn't need to be difficult. We've really invested a lot of time in making it as easy as possible. We care about the product. We also care about the experience of just getting to use the product. We think of that as part of the product experience, as part of the user experience. So
SPEAKER_02:I can't believe two to three weeks. I mean, that's amazing because I look at like, I saw something on Doja's website the other day and I'm not dealing with politics, but I'm thinking about, they were doing an overall of, I think it was the IRS system. And Something like$11 billion in 15 years and nothing's been produced. And I'm thinking, really? I mean, that's horrible. And nobody wants to say, okay, it's going to take two years to implement new technology because you know this from your background. Two years technology, that's five, six generations
SPEAKER_01:gone. Right, right. Like you're always playing catch up then. If it's going to take years to implement, it's like, oh, we're already late again. We're back to implementing. Yeah, implementation speed matters for that reason. I don't think that's something people talk a lot about in government technology. If it's going to take two years, you're probably not going to be getting the most modern technology. It's going to be a pain to upgrade. It should feel natural. New updates come out. It should be coming out constantly.
SPEAKER_02:Right, absolutely. All right, let's switch this up. Rapid fire questions. You ready? All right, texting or talking?
SPEAKER_01:Talking.
SPEAKER_02:Movies or books?
SPEAKER_01:Books.
SPEAKER_02:Coffee, tea, or energy drink? Tea. Cats or dogs? Dogs. Favorite go-to karaoke song?
SPEAKER_01:That's a tough one. Let's go party in the USA. All
SPEAKER_02:right. If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
SPEAKER_01:I feel like time travel would be amazing.
SPEAKER_02:If you could instantly become an expert in one thing, what would it be? I
SPEAKER_01:would love to learn more about physics and especially all the crazy stuff that's going on in particle physics. That would be a really cool area.
SPEAKER_02:Ask permission or beg for forgiveness?
SPEAKER_01:Beg for forgiveness.
SPEAKER_02:What place do you most
SPEAKER_01:want to travel
SPEAKER_02:to? I
SPEAKER_01:feel like Japan's on the list. I've heard great things about... I think there's like this five-day hiking thing you can do in the southern part of Chile that I've heard. And I've really wanted to do that with my brother. So that's another one on the list.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Yeah. Uh, what is that? Puka? Um, I know. All right. Uh, favorite way to relax after a long day, right? Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Favorite way to relax after a long day.
SPEAKER_02:What's your favorite way to relax? Yes. What's your favorite way?
SPEAKER_01:I love cooking. So I'm a big fan of, you know, making, you know, sitting down and making a nice meal. Um, I also like to write in my free time. So that's something I'll often do. Um, those are, those are two up there.
SPEAKER_02:If you could sit down and have tea with any historical figure living or dead, who would it be?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that is a good one. I would go really far back, and I would probably go to Egyptian times, because the thing that shocks me is the start of their civilization to the end of Egyptian dynasties is actually longer than from the end to today. So I would be super curious to just hear in the middle, how did they maintain the dynasties and civilizations for that long? I think it's so fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah. There's some technology that was lost somewhere. Oh, I agree. Don't get me, I'll go conspiracy theory on that one for you. All right, some final thoughts. What key points would you like our listeners to take from today's interview?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I think the first one is, look, AI is not something to be scared of. It's something that can be really, really valuable for your constituents. Remember, you know, we talk about this with everyone. Customer service is our number one job and it really can make a difference there. I think right now we're, we got this hiring challenges already. I think that's only going to get worse. And so the question is, prepare today to make sure we're providing the best customer service we can for the future for our residents and our businesses and our visitors in a world where we might have less and less resources to do that. It doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be a scary thing, but find the right partner. And there's a lot of folks already doing it. So it's not jumping in first. So I'd say now is the time to be second and don't be last.
SPEAKER_02:As we wrap this up, is there a motto or a piece of wisdom that you live by?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the one I live by, I live by two. So the first one is more a technical one. It's move the mean of standard deviation. So I think about that in a lot of stuff we do is, hey, I don't really believe in incrementalism, right? Like there's a lot of small pieces that matter. But when we think about the stuff we do, we really want to improve outcomes by a meaningful change where people can see that and feel that difference. But the one I live by personally a lot is the strength within you is greater than the task ahead of you. That's a big one I live by. Okay. Outstanding.
SPEAKER_02:All right, Parth, here's your chance again. Let's talk about how people can reach out and connect with Polymorphic.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So Polymorphic, once again, we do AI and CRM and workflows with our AI concierge. We have the chatbot, the search on the phone system. That one's great. So if you have phone trees and things like that, a lot of time savings, 24-7, multiple languages. And then we have a great kind of CRM workflow tool if you're struggling with paper-based processes Reach out. We're always excited for just a conversation, too. It might not be the timing now. It might not be you're just interested in AI. But the best way to reach out, go to our website, polymorphic.com. That's P-O-L-I-M-O-R-P-H-I-C.com. Google sometimes will change it to a Y, but it's P-O-L-I. My email is parth at polymorphic.com, so feel free to email me as well directly. I love to hear from all the local government leaders. But definitely check out the site. If you're interested, request a demo. It doesn't have to be a high commitment thing. I would say the demo is free, right? So meet our team. They're great folks. They'd love to chat more and learn and looking forward to hearing from folks.
SPEAKER_02:And I'll add all that into the show notes. Perfect. Parth, thank you very much for being on the show. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Appreciate
SPEAKER_02:it. I hope you enjoyed this episode and our content. If you are listening on a platform that allows reviews, please give us a review. We read all reviews and your feedback is essential. Do not forget to check out our sponsor social news desk thank you social news desk for their sponsorship and their offer to all our listeners please click the link at the bottom of today's show notes to help support the show your support in any amount is greatly appreciated until next time take care stay curious and keep the conversation going you're the heart and soul of the pio podcast
