City of Scottsdale Gives
Residents Instant AI Answers
with Ask Scottie

Scottsdale's city website contained extensive, high-quality information across more than ten properties covering city services, the library, calendar events, parks and recreation, public works, courts, and more. The challenge was accessibility. Content was organized around departmental structures, which made sense from an administrative perspective but created friction for residents who arrived with a task in mind rather than knowledge of how city services were divided. PDFs buried key guidance. Instructions were sometimes inconsistent across department pages. High-traffic areas like the city court generated significant inbound contact volume because residents could not quickly confirm court dates, deadlines, or documentation requirements without speaking to a staff member. The city's existing chatbot was limited to a basic decision-tree model that could not handle natural language, lacked source attribution, and lost conversation context when residents navigated between pages.

The consequence was predictable. Residents who could not complete tasks online switched to 311 calls, emails, and direct department contacts, creating avoidable demand that consumed staff capacity and slowed response times for more complex inquiries. City staff faced the same challenge internally, spending time answering routine policy questions that should have been instantly accessible through self-service. What was missing was an AI layer capable of converting published city content into natural language, context-aware conversational answers, grounded in official sources, available around the clock, and delivered without requiring residents to navigate departmental structures on their own.

Cloudwick Technologies deployed Ask Scottie as a city-branded AI resident assistant embedded directly across Scottsdale's website properties, powered by Amorphic Resident Assistant and Amazon Bedrock. The solution was implemented as an embeddable JavaScript widget deployable across all City of Scottsdale websites from a single embed script, with per-site configuration for theme and service area. Cloudwick handled content onboarding, pathway design, website implementation, branding, and ongoing operations, giving the city an immediately operational managed AI service rather than a build-it-yourself chatbot requiring internal maintenance.

Amazon Bedrock provides the AI foundation for Ask Scottie's core capabilities: natural language understanding of resident questions, AI-powered retrieval and synthesis across official city content, and citation-backed response generation that links every answer directly to the source page on the city website. Content from all approved city website properties is automatically ingested through a daily crawler-based refresh running between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM, keeping Ask Scottie current without manual intervention. Amazon S3 stores indexed content; AWS Lambda handles serverless query processing and response generation; AWS IAM and AWS KMS enforce access controls and encryption; and Amazon CloudWatch provides operational monitoring, health checks, and alerting.

Ask Scottie surfaces an initial response within approximately 4 seconds, with full AI-generated answers delivered in under 8 seconds. Residents type questions in plain language and receive responses with clickable source citations and interactive query suggestions that guide them toward the most common service journeys. Session memory persists across pages so residents do not lose context as they navigate between city websites.

For transactional needs, Ask Scottie integrates with city services through MCP-based connections, allowing residents to take action directly within the chat experience. When a question requires human support, Ask Scottie connects residents to live agents via Amazon Connect, with a time-aware handoff: during business hours, a live connection is offered; outside business hours, the assistant provides alternative contact options while continuing to deliver AI-powered answers. City administrators gain access to a comprehensive analytics dashboard covering top resident intents, session volumes, content gaps, abandon patterns, peak usage times, and service demand trends — turning every resident interaction into actionable intelligence for improving city services.

Ask Scottie transformed how Scottsdale residents interact with city information online. Residents who previously faced fragmented navigation across more than ten city website properties now have access to an AI assistant that delivers source-cited answers grounded in official city content, available 24 hours a day. The top resident questions — trash pickup schedules, court contact information, parks and events registration, bill payment, and permit guidance — are surfaced and answered without requiring residents to navigate department structures or call city staff for routine information.

For staff, Ask Scottie's ability to deliver instant answers to policy and procedural questions reduced the internal burden of routine information lookup, allowing staff to redirect time toward more complex resident needs. Transactional integrations through MCP connections and live agent handoff via Amazon Connect extended the platform beyond a simple Q&A tool, enabling residents to complete tasks and reach support without leaving the chat experience.

City leadership gained a level of visibility into resident needs that had not previously existed. The analytics dashboard surfaces real-time data on what residents are asking, where they are getting stuck, and which content gaps are generating the most avoidable contacts. Top intents including trash pickup day, court contact, parks events, bill payment, and permits were immediately visible as the highest-volume resident needs, giving the city a data-driven foundation for continuously improving both the AI assistant and the underlying website content that supports it.