{"id":185370,"date":"2025-08-29T19:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T19:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185370\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T19:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T19:33:11","slug":"new-fort-worth-ai-firm-offers-way-to-report-on-thousands-of-public-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185370\/","title":{"rendered":"New Fort Worth AI firm offers way to report on thousands of public meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fort Worth-based technology firm CoverGov<\/a> is using artificial intelligence to generate summaries and transcripts of public meetings.<\/p>\n

Entrepreneur Connor Higgins, who grew up in Fort Worth, launched CoverGov in June with a six-employee team that includes software developers and Brinton Payne, a fixture in local government affairs.<\/p>\n

CoverGov uses video, agendas and other metadata to create transcriptions of meetings held by thousands of public entities in Texas and other states such as California. Potential clients include the financial sector, government affairs and news media. The company also can build custom tools for clients that let them search its database for meetings using keywords of interest.<\/p>\n

Higgins, 24, who previously worked for a legal technology firm in Fort Worth where he ran a team of developers who built products for lawyers, had earlier noodled with Payne, 52, about an AI platform that could analyze large datasets and have broad potential reach. AI technology caught up to the idea, they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up in and around this space, I had friends, family and businesses I knew that were drowning, trying to keep up with this world of government information,\u201d said Higgins, who earned his bachelor\u2019s in economics from Wake Forest University. \u201cWe thought there\u2019s got to be a better way to do this. There\u2019s got to be a way to add some simplicity, get people home on time to have dinner with their family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Payne compares the volume of information available on the web to oceans.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people don\u2019t want to go out to the ocean to catch the fish; they would rather just eat the dinner,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"\"CoverGov founder Connor Higgins, left, poses with his business partner Brinton Payne on Aug. 21, 2025, at the Fort Worth Club in downtown. (Mary Abby Goss | Fort Worth Report)<\/p>\n

Complements Documenters<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Fort Worth Report is launching a partnership with CoverGov, which uses artificial intelligence to produce summaries of public meetings in our region. Along with an experienced journalist on our Documenters team, senior editor Scott Nishimura will verify the information and provide the same sort of short stories we\u2019re already generating through our Documenters program.<\/p>\n

We intend to use this partnership to extend civic coverage into suburban public entities across and around Tarrant County into which we haven\u2019t yet been able to extend our reach. We remain committed to placing real live Documenters in as many public meetings as possible, too.<\/p>\n

These AI-generated and human-edited summaries are part of a pilot program designed to test the new technology, so we want to hear from you about this coverage. Each item created with AI will be clearly identified. Please share your thoughts after you read the reports each week by emailing news@fortworthreport.org<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CoverGov, which Higgins described as financially \u201cbootstrapping\u201d the startup, began beta testing in November before doing its hard launch this summer. Its developers are working to close the gap on accuracy, Higgins said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would like our transcripts to be considered a primary document,\u201d he said. \u201cAlready, the technology is more than ear accurate. There are instances where the phonetics of somebody\u2019s name result in a misspelling because that\u2019s what it sounds like, and we\u2019re working on tools right now to smooth that out. But as far as numbers, inflection, information, it\u2019s extremely accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n

CoverGov\u2019s transcripts include summaries that highlight what the technology determined were the most important aspects of the meeting. Click on a line in the summary, and the transcript reveals more detailed information about that point in the discussion. The firm\u2019s developers also are working toward improving the model so it better understands controversy.<\/p>\n

Another key barrier to building the product is ensuring the platform has a broad array of data and isn\u2019t just tracking one governmental entity, for example, Higgins said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to have enough information for it to be appetizing to potential clients,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Other AI models are surfacing across the country that are targeted at news media<\/a> as potential clients, given the continued decline of local journalism nationally.<\/p>\n

A nonprofit Boston group, Cambridge Artificial Intelligencer \u2014 led by media executive Charles Kravetz and sales executive Mark Coffey \u2014 has raised $650,000 toward a $3.5 million goal to launch an AI-powered platform with tools that journalists can use to follow what\u2019s going on in local government and capture and analyze trends. Cambridge would offer the platform and tools for free to newsrooms, they said.<\/p>\n

Kravetz, who led the New England Cable News network<\/a> for years, \u201chad an inspiration that AI would either be the nail in the coffin for local newsrooms, or the very thing that might save it if there\u2019s a very intentional and studied response,\u201d Coffey said in an interview with Kravetz.<\/p>\n

The two cite media industry statistics showing the impact of shrinking newsrooms on American democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re heading toward 100 million Americans living in a proverbial news desert, really, really quickly,\u201d Coffey said. \u201cThat\u2019s the crisis in local journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group originally was trying to raise $7 million to start its own newsroom, but has switched to its current model. They\u2019ve raised $650,000, including a $500,000 gift from The Navigation Fund<\/a>, Kravetz and Coffey said.<\/p>\n

Kravetz and Coffey described their platform development as being in the \u201cadvanced stages.\u201d Using a meeting transcript generated by it, journalists would be able to use the platform to build stories with direct quotes and direct the AI to dive deeper into selected aspects, they said. A journalist toggling over a meeting transcript would be able to highlight any section of it and play the video clip of that part of the meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is central to this product,\u201d Kravetz said. \u201cYou can check it, you can listen to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Playing a demo of a transcript produced by the platform, he said, \u201cthis is a long meeting. It goes for two and half hours. No one\u2019s going to just look through this thing or read this transcript, but you can go to specific parts of it and check to see if it is accurate. That is an essential part of what we\u2019re doing here: giving journalists the tools to trust, but verify, what has been created through artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the model better understands journalism, the group\u2019s developers are loading the app with examples of high-quality journalism, they said.<\/p>\n

The app generates summaries highlighting what occurred during the meeting. Reporters using the platform can push a button to rearrange a summary to focus on what they view as the most important piece of the meeting.<\/p>\n

The technology isn\u2019t meant to replace human journalists. Rather, the sole journalist in a small newsroom would be able to use the technology to reach substantially more happenings in her community than she is today, they said.<\/p>\n

At CoverGov, now in its first year, \u201cour focus is on building trust with and delivering growth to our users, proving the value of turning complex government data into clear, actionable intelligence,\u201d Higgins said. \u201cGrowing strong partnerships \u2014 especially local ones \u2014 is at the core of what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking forward five years, \u201cWe see CoverGov as the standard platform for intelligent coverage of government activity, streamlining the way organizations track policy, compliance and municipal trends across the entire country,\u201d he said. \u201cBy then, we\u2019ll be known as the go-to layer of clarity between raw government data and the leaders who depend on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott Nishimura is a senior editor for the Documenters program at the Fort Worth Report. Reach him at scott.nishimura@fortworthreport.org.At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated\n<\/p>\n

Fort Worth Report is certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative<\/a> for adhering to standards for ethical journalism.<\/p>\n

Republish This Story<\/p>\n

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