Smart Tech, Real Savings: Inside our Latest AI Breakthroughs

We are back with another exciting update from the Digital Innovation Task Force. Our latest St. Joseph County DITF meeting was packed with big ideas, practical tech tools, and great discussions. We are working hard to use artificial intelligence (AI) to design custom, modern tools that save time, protect your data, and make working with county tech easier for everyone.

A Smarter Way to Work: The DICE Portal

If you have ever worked in an office, you know how fast email inboxes can get completely overwhelmed. Between website updates, tech questions, and digital design requests, our team handles a massive wave of messages every day.

To solve this, we gave a demonstration of our new, developing DICE Portal. We are moving away from messy, endless email chains and switching to a centralized submission center for all internal county requests. Whether someone needs a document fixed for ADA accessibility, a quick change made to a web page, or has a general web question, it will all live in one organized place.

How the AI Intake Agent Works:

The coolest part of the portal is the smart project intake tool. Instead of forcing county staff to sit through long, tech-heavy meetings to map out what they need, they can chat with an AI intake agent at their own pace.

• Take Your Time: Staff can describe their request, leave the conversation, and return to it whenever they want.
• Smart Guidance: The AI agent understands our specific county tech setup. It will ask structured follow-up questions and suggest possibilities to help refine the request.
• Calculating Real Savings: The system will automatically ask how the work is currently being done, how long it takes, and how much staff time is involved.

By gathering these details up front, the DID team can instantly estimate time savings and project priority. This ensures we tackle the most impactful tasks first, streamlining our workflow and making sure county operations run as efficiently as possible!

Smart Mapping: The New Parcel Viewer

We also shared a sneak peek of our new, internally built Parcel Viewer. Instead of buying expensive, rigid software from outside companies, we are coding our own open-source tool from scratch to match our community’s exact needs.

Here are a few cool features we are testing:

• “MapBuddy”: An AI assistant that helps you control the map using simple, everyday language.
• Plain-Language Tax Help: Property taxes can be confusing. The tool uses AI to break down property records and tax terms into clear, simple language.
• Mix-and-Match Blocks: You won’t always have to load a massive map to get details. Other county departments will be able to take small pieces of this tool and put them right on their own web pages for quick searches.

Web Accessibility Made Easy

We believe county digital tools should be easy for all residents to use. Making maps accessible to people with visual impairments has always been a tough challenge because maps are so visual. Our solution? We are testing an AI vision model that can look at a map and describe what is on it out loud (like, “This property sits next to a water feature with a 30-foot setback”).

We are also coding a creative, automated solution for digital accessibility. Right now, things like official letterheads, flyers, and graphic seals can accidentally block screen-readers from reading text. We are developing an automated upload and remediation tool within the DICE Portal. County staff will be able to drag and drop a document or image, and the tool will instantly transform it into a clean, ADA-compliant version. This ensures our web work, PDFs, and social media posts are automatically open and readable for everyone without adding hours of extra design work!

Turning Prototypes Into Safe Software

There is a new phrase in the tech world called “vibe coding.” It means using AI to quickly build a working prototype or a basic version of a tool just by describing what you want. While our team is great at using AI to build these early layouts, a raw prototype is not ready for public use right away.

To make sure your personal data is perfectly safe and our county systems are totally secure, we hired a new engineer. This person’s entire job will be to take our fast AI prototypes and test, harden, and secure them. AI helps us design the concept fast, but human experts make sure the final code is 100% safe and reliable before it goes live.

Watching Out for Risks

AI brings huge benefits, but we are also staying very careful. We had an important discussion about community requests to record and post all public meetings online. While transparency is vital, AI voice-cloning means that public recorded voices can be stolen and misused for fraud or scams.

We aren’t letting this stop our progress, but we are doing our homework. We are using research from Michigan State University’s Cyberterrorism Center to study these risks carefully before changing how we post videos.

So, What’s Next?

From brainstorming easy online park and campground reservation systems to building better web tools for managing public grants, we are focused on creating innovative, easy-to-use digital solutions. We want to make sure our digital backyard is modern, accessible, and built to last.

Stay tuned for our next update, and let us know what county services you would love to see us upgrade next!