What Charleston’s towns learned putting AI on the front desk
What do a town hall and a small business have in common? The same ten questions, asked all day.
Two local governments decided AI should take those questions first.
Sawyer and Mani
Mount Pleasant runs Sawyer, a virtual assistant built by Charleston company Citibot. Residents can report a pothole, check trash pickup or file a service request by web, text or phone. It works in more than 70 languages on web and text.
Dorchester County Water & Sewer launched Mani, a chat assistant also built by Citibot. It answers water and sewer customers around the clock in 75 languages.
Charleston County is going a step further. With Palmetto Goodwill, it’s offering small businesses an AI platform called GoodBiz.AI, with the cost covered for up to 250 local businesses for two years.
What to take from it
Neither town started with AI. They started with a list of questions residents already ask, and clear answers to them. The assistant just made those answers available at 10pm in Spanish.
Your business can do the first part today, free. Open your FAQ page, your email inbox, or the notes your front desk keeps. Write the top 20 questions with the answer you’d give.
Then mark the ones that should always go to a person. Refunds, complaints, anything about safety. Both town assistants route those to staff, and yours should too.
Try this
Paste your list into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask: “Turn this into short Q&A pairs for a chatbot, plus a list of questions that should always go to a staff member.” That document is the hard part of any chatbot. The software is the easy part.
Both examples, with sources, are in the local government section of the directory.
Published by Charleston AI Playbook.
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