A small mountain ski town is training cameras already positioned in the landscape to alert officials to wildfires.
Meanwhile, numerous tasks in this town of 4,000 annual residents are being improved with technology, placing repetitive, manual processes into the hands of AI tools, freeing up workers for more meaningful interactions with everyday homeowners, businesses and visitors.
“As we had this two-day iterative discussion, we saw real applications of how we could be more efficient with our time, with really mundane daily things we do every day,” Russell Forrest, Vail, Colo., town manager, said. Officials met several months ago with technology providers to discuss how the town might turn to AI tech tools to improve operations internally and better serve the few thousand year-round residents — and some 3 million annual visitors.
Vail is turning to a suite of AI-powered technologies to aid in four key areas: fire detection, website accessibility compliance, document management and external engagement with the public. SHI International Corp. served as the coordinator for the project, bringing the various technology partners together.
Smart city technology companies like HPE, Kamiwaza AI, Vaidio and ProHawk AI are making their tools available in Vail via the HPE Agentic Smart City Solution.
The company Kamiwaza AI is involved in scanning the city’s website, evaluating its compliance with heightened accessibility regulations, and producing web pages and documents that are fully accessible to people with disabilities. The agentic AI technology can also translate into other languages.
Agentic AI and other technologies are also part of an early detection system for wildfires, using existing cameras and enhanced video analytics to bring improved situational awareness of Vail’s rugged mountain landscape. The Vail Fire and Emergency Services project includes computer vision and video analytics technology from ProHawk and Vaido, and agentic AI technology from Kamiwaza.
Agentic AI technology is also helping to automate the cumbersome rules related to buying or transferring affordable housing properties.
“It can be a two-day process to go back and look at records associated with the property … to be able to say, ‘hey, here are the parameters for selling or renting that property,’” Forrest said. “A two-day task is now [a] couple of seconds.”
Those city staffers who were spending hours on administrative tasks are now free to work one-on-one with residents on more nuanced requests, he said.
“Now, these same individuals, instead of recordkeeping and looking at mundane records, they can spend more time with you as a first-time homeowner, walking you through the nerve-wracking process of buying a home,” Forrest said.
Still to be deployed is what Forrest describes as a web “avatar” to answer resident and visitor questions. The 24-hour digital ambassador will be supported by the HPE platform.
“The HPE Agentic Smart City Solution enhances municipal operations by securely integrating data and AI across departments to support faster, better decisions,” Luke Norris, Kamiwaza AI CEO and co-founder, said via email. “For example, AI-driven systems can detect wildfires early using enhanced video analytics, automate deed restriction processing to reduce manual errors, and deploy digital assistants to handle public inquiries in real time — all running on HPE infrastructure and NVIDIA AI computing.”
These AI system integrations allow cities to operate more efficiently, with improved emergency response times and new engagement opportunities with residents and visitors, Norris said.
Other cities are using AI tools to find problems in the landscape. San Jose, Calif., has been experimenting with AI to identify road hazards like potholes, and using AI tools to aid in planning and permitting. These are the kinds of labor-intensive, repetitive jobs best outsourced to technology tools, officials said.
“For me, it was, I need to put AI over this municipal code, because, ‘what the hell is this thing?’” Nichole Sterling, mayor pro tem and Board of Trustees member in Nederland, Colo., and founder of the company My Town AI, said earlier this month at the GovAI Coalition Summit* in San Jose.
“I would start with the most painful, the most annoying, and the most unproductive use of your time,” Andrew Ngui, chief digital officer for city of Kansas City, Mo., said at the same event.
And even though Vail is, realistically, a small mountain town, it holds “this audacious vision of being the premier mountain resort community in the world,” its town manager said.
“To do that, we’ve got to embrace innovation and creativity,” Forrest said. “And one of the things we’ve got to find more time to do is, spend time with our customers. And our customers are residents, our guests, the employees that work here.”
*The GovAI Coalition Summit was hosted by Government Technology in partnership with the GovAI Coalition and the city of San Jose.
