City of Raleigh<\/a>, told Cities Today. \u201cIT had to innovate.\u201d<\/p>\nThe city uses two AI agents. Ral-E guides employees through service requests, routes tickets and answers questions using Raleigh\u2019s knowledge base across IT, human resources and facilities.<\/p>\n
Alli, its L1 AI Specialist, handles common requests from beginning to end, escalating cases when human involvement is required. Through early access to an autonomous workforce of AI specialists, Raleigh is seeking to move from systems that assist staff to agents that complete entire tasks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the ServiceNow AI agents taking the load off, our staff can cross-train, learn new skills, and focus on bringing what we\u2019ve learned on our journey to assist other departments to accelerate their business goals,\u201d Wittenburg said.<\/p>\n
Raleigh now wants to make Ral-E and Alli available to residents navigating municipal services. Its Ask Raleigh public-service portal provides a foundation for the city to apply lessons from its internal deployment to community-facing services.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the challenges in local government is that residents don\u2019t always know what to ask,\u201d Wittenburg said. \u201cThe goal is to guide them like someone who\u2019s been through it before and shift the city from reactive to preventive with fewer calls and faster answers by asking the question, \u2018How do we anticipate and resolve challenges before they become a community concern?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Finance, facilities, transport and permitting are also on Raleigh\u2019s roadmap because they combine large volumes of repetitive work with extensive data. The city is piloting agents in finance and cybersecurity to analyse complex, cross-departmental datasets that currently take days to process.<\/p>\n
Wittenburg said Raleigh\u2019s deployment was supported by more than a decade of work on its technology and data foundations. The city had already introduced digital workflows for IT service management, human resources, facilities and security, creating structured data and a trusted knowledge base.<\/p>\n
It had also gained experience with ticket summarisation and traditional chatbots before testing the L1 specialist between February and April and deploying it in May.<\/p>\n
Introducing autonomous agents required staff involvement, education and communication as employees reconsidered how their roles could change.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottom line is to treat AI agents like employees you\u2019re training, not magic black boxes,\u201d Wittenburg said. \u201cBuild trust incrementally. Involve staff in improvement, not replacement.\u201d<\/p>\n
He advised other local government leaders to strengthen their data, knowledge and processes before pursuing standalone pilots.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy advice is, do the basics, do them well, have a solid foundation, and then start to experiment,\u201d Wittenburg said. \u201cAI isn\u2019t a replacement for those things. It amplifies them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Image: City of Raleigh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"05 August 2026 by Jonathan Andrews The City of Raleigh plans to extend AI agents from its internal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,25,7537,512,19661,29623,4707,65647,62261],"class_list":["post-131397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-automation","tag-digital-services","tag-it-support","tag-local-government","tag-mark-wittenburg","tag-raleigh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}