The county's new AI assistant found a wrong phone number in an old press release. Ask your vendor these four questions

What happened in Kansas City

Axios Kansas City reported on October 21, 2026 that Wyandotte County and Jackson County have adopted AI assistants from Granicus, the government website and communications company. Residents can ask questions on the county website and get answers at any hour.

The useful part isn't the announcement. It's how Jackson County got there, which Granicus described in a blog post about the rollout. Staff started by writing down the questions callers actually ask, along with the right answers. The assistant was built from those answers plus the county's website content, and Granicus says it only draws on data the agency has approved. Granicus ran automated tests on common questions, and county staff checked the results themselves.

That testing caught something every agency should expect. The assistant gave out an incorrect phone number, which it had picked up from an old press release still sitting on the site.

Granicus also reports that the county's deputy director saw an initial 10% reduction in basic questions reaching the call center, and that many residents use it after 5 p.m., when they open their mail. The next step, according to the post, is connecting it more deeply to county systems.

Question one: which pages does it read, and who retires the old ones

An assistant can only be as current as the oldest page it's allowed to read. Your website almost certainly has years of press releases, meeting notices, PDFs of old forms and pages for programs that ended. A person browsing the site can tell a 2019 release from a current page. A model drawing on everything approved may not.

Ask the vendor:

• Exactly which pages and documents will it draw from, and can we exclude whole sections, like the news archive?
• Can we see the list of sources behind any single answer?
• When we update a page, how quickly does the assistant use the new version?

Then ask yourself who on staff will retire outdated content. If nobody owns the archive today, the assistant will inherit that problem. A sensible first project is an inventory of pages that contain phone numbers, addresses, fees and deadlines, because those are the facts residents act on.

Question two: what does it do when it doesn't know

Every assistant reaches the edge of what it knows. What matters is what happens next.

Ask the vendor to show you, live, a question the assistant can't answer. Does it say so plainly? Does it point to a phone number, a form or a named office? During business hours, can it hand the conversation to a person? After hours, what does a resident get?

Then ask the harder version: what happens with a question that sounds routine but isn't, like someone asking about a property tax payment who is actually describing a hardship. Your call center staff recognize those calls. Decide in advance which topics should always route to a person, and confirm the assistant can be set up that way.

Ask about reach as well. Can it answer in the languages your residents speak, and does it work with a screen reader and a keyboard alone? If the vendor says yes, ask them to show it in the demo rather than send a statement later.

This matters most for the residents who rely on the phone today. An assistant should add a door. It shouldn't close the existing one.

Question three: what is it allowed to say about money, deadlines and eligibility

There's a difference between "the treasurer's office is open until 4:30" and "you owe $1,240 and the penalty starts Friday." The first is a website fact. The second is a determination residents will act on.

Ask the vendor:

• Can we restrict it from stating amounts, due dates or eligibility, and have it link to the official page or tool instead?
• If a resident says the assistant told them something wrong about a payment, what record exists of the conversation?
• How are those conversations stored, for how long, and who can retrieve them?

That last question isn't only technical. Chat transcripts with residents may count as public records in your state. Talk to your records officer and your attorney before launch, not after the first request arrives.

Question four: how will staff find out when it's wrong

Jackson County found the bad phone number because people tested the assistant before residents did. That has to keep happening after launch.

Ask the vendor what staff can see. Can someone review a sample of real questions and answers each week? Can residents flag a bad answer, and where does that flag go? When staff correct a page, can they confirm the assistant's answer changed?

Ask, too, what the vendor watches on its side. Will it tell you when answers on a topic start going wrong, or when the model behind the assistant changes? A model update can shift answers overnight, and you want to hear about it from them, not from a resident.

Then assign it. Name one person per department who reviews that department's questions monthly, and give them a simple routine: read the questions it struggled with, fix the source page, and retest. The number of questions reaching the call center will tell you whether it's being used. The weekly review tells you whether it's right.

What to do before your demo

Start where Jackson County started. Ask your call center staff to write down the twenty questions they answer most and the correct answer to each. That list does three jobs at once: it tells you whether you need an assistant at all, it gives you a test set for every vendor demo, and it shows you which pages on your site need fixing first.

Settle the contract questions early too. Ask who owns the conversation records, whether the vendor may use them to train or improve its models, what it costs to add departments later, and how you would take your content and records with you if you switched vendors. These are easier to agree before a signature than after.

Bring the four questions to every demo. Ask each vendor to answer them in writing, and score the answers side by side. The vendor with the smoothest demo isn't necessarily the one that will catch your outdated press release.

If you're planning a resident-facing assistant, or cleaning up the website it will depend on, that's the work our government and public sector team does. Talk to us.

Related work: Sutton Place.