Westminster City Council

Public sector organizations are increasingly embracing gen AI to address the needs of diverse communities. Based in the heart of London, Westminster City Council is using gen AI to enhance experiences for 250,000 residents, businesses, and the millions of tourists who visit the city annually.

The Council looks to efficiently provide housing, social services, public health planning, city safety, and more. With that in mind, they are reimagining how to deliver all of these services at scale.

“At the end of the day, we want to improve residents’ lives,” says Sarah Williams, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Westminster City Council. “An important part of our efforts includes taking a data-driven, people-centric approach to achieve our goals.”Westminster City Council recently embarked on a gen AI journey with Google Cloud and partner Ancoris to transform how citizens report problems with dumped waste, potholes, graffiti, and other issues. The system, called Report It, required Westminster City Council to restructure their organizational processes and related technologies.

Report It was a manifesto commitment to simplify interactions between the council and the people it serves. Through extensive user research, the council identified more than 80 ways its residents and visitors could interact. The focus quickly turned to Report It and taking action on user feedback regarding the use of AI.

As a first step, the organization sought to strengthen cross-team collaboration and eliminate data siloes created by legacy processes and systems. The lack of unified teams and processes prevented the organization from benefiting from advanced analytics, including taking advantage of powerful new gen AI capabilities.

Westminster City Council had traditionally relied on single-focus teams to address specific needs of citizens, tourists, and others. In response, the organization refined its structure to create multi-disciplinary teams.

Report It has always been an important resident service, especially given the challenges associated with having millions of people visit world-renowned attractions within the borough such as Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and Trafalgar Square.

Based on a recommendation from the Google Cloud team, Westminster City Council worked with Ancoris to develop a pilot for a revamped Report It application that updated everything from the backend to UX design. Ancoris had also previously worked with the council on an air quality project several years back.

Ancoris used Vertex AI to stand up the gen AI-powered Report It tool, and worked closely with Westminster City Council to ensure design best practices.

Vertex AI acts as the central platform to manage AI/ML model workflows used in the solution, and its Model Registry is used to store, version, and manage the foundational and customer AI models used, as well as to orchestrate training of customer models using datasets stored in Google Cloud Storage. Vertex AI endpoints deploy trained models for real-time predictions.

Vision API is used to extract information from images uploaded by Westminster’s residents and visitors in the reports they submit, while BigQuery acts as the central data warehouse for storing and analyzing the data in the reports made to the council. Model performance metrics, and application logs are also handled in BigQuery, while insights from data analysis and model performance are used to improve the system and make decisions on new feature implementation, chatbot interactions, and integrations with other council services.

The application’s frontend and integration layers with AI chatbot models, image classification, and object recognition, are hosted on Firebase. Google Maps API provides geolocation for items reported and Credential Manager manages API keys and secrets.

Ancoris also made sure this solution could integrate with various third-party systems such as the council’s authentication provider, CRM, GIS, and property and street registry platforms.

In addition, Ancoris upskilled staff across the three multidisciplinary product teams that manage Report It. The training strengthened collaboration between Westminster City Council and Ancoris leading up to the pilot launch.

Vertex AI also proved to be the right solution due to its ease of use.

Ancoris helped Westminster City Council on its journey from prototype to production through an iterative development process that delivered the right application within a matter of months.

Through the successful updating, Report It, today, delivers a streamlined, reliable, and intuitive service so Westminster residents can submit one of their most cited grievances – dumped waste and street cleaning.

Originally posted on the Google Cloud website – read the full case study here.