Matt Fraser still wants to expand MyCity and AI chatbot

Mayor Eric Adams came into office more than three years ago promising a major technology transformation. In a fireside chat at City & State’s Digital New York Summit on Wednesday, New York City Chief Technology Officer Matt Fraser argued that the administration has taken steps to deliver on that.

At the beginning of his term, Adams consolidated the city’s technology and IT offices to form the Office of Technology and Innovation, led by Fraser. How comprehensively the city’s capabilities and operations have been transformed by that reorganization is a matter of debate. But among OTI’s areas of focus are closing the digital divide and making it easier to access city services. In its first year, the office launched a program to provide New York City Housing Authority residents with free internet and cable, called Big Apple Connect. That program faced some scrutiny from proponents of the approach that a similar de Blasio-era plan took, but Fraser argued Wednesday that the city was able to deliver more service faster and cheaper under the Adams administration’s plan.

Adams’ campaign promise to create a one-stop shop to apply for city benefits has been another focus of the office, though it’s come slower than expected, and is still far from a transformative one-stop shop. More recently, the office secured a deal with T-Mobile to become the major carrier for city-issued devices, and launched a digital equity roadmap.

In the conversation on Wednesday, Fraser defended the gradual development of the MyCity tool, previewed an expansion of a controversial AI chatbot and provided an update on the city’s artificial intelligence policy plans.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The creation of the Office of Technology and Innovation was intended to make the city’s technology and IT offices more efficient and help the city leverage technology in useful ways to city services and constituents. Can you tell me about how OTI has achieved this in the past three years? What accomplishments do you think have fulfilled that promise?

When we created the Office of Tech and Innovation, our whole goal was breaking the foundation of what people believe tech was in New York City and establishing an entity that had the influence and the control to make strategic decisions about tech in New York City. … When I stepped in, we had a program at the time called the Internet Master Plan, and it was a program that was projected to cost about $2 billion, and it was funded for the first phase at $157 million. The program existed for three years prior to the time I took the seat, and it had not delivered a single connection to anyone. That was during 2020, 2021 – probably the largest need for connectivity in modern history. And we had $157 million in a pot, and we didn’t deliver a contract. We didn’t deliver service. (Editor’s note: The prior administration did have a pilot predecessor to the Internet Master Plan underway at more than a dozen public housing developments.) And I think this is a testament to why the creation of OTI was necessary. Part of the reason for that was there was a legacy office in City Hall that was positioned to make strategic decisions around tech, but it had no power or authority to execute on those decisions. And then you had an agency that was largely a managed service provider for the city that had a massive amount of tech authority, but also had little vision and strategy of how to help the people that live in the city. So we come in, we look at the decision, we create Big Apple Connect. And within a year of sitting in office, for a fraction of the cost of the $2 billion program, we provide connectivity to over 330,000 people in the city. … One of the things that we announced recently was the partnership that we established with T-Mobile for cell phones. … New York City, perhaps from a municipal perspective, is one of the largest customers for any wireless carrier. We have over 100,000 cell phones, and if you add in tablets, we have well over a million end points. … Just by consolidating carriers, we saved over $10 million a year. And in addition to that, we extended discounts down to city employees, which means that city employees will save over $180 million back at home. Technology making smart decisions for the people that live and work in the city – that’s what OTI is about.

Any other accomplishments that speak to OTI using its power and authority?

One of the fun things is that, like I tell many people, some days my job is technology, some days it’s everything but technology. And that’s the sign, I think, of a good tech leader. We’ve evolved in such a way where we’re a cornerstone in almost every conversation. So what we’ve done around MyCity for child care – what does the city's tech authority have to do with managing childcare? Simple: we’re smart people that understand business process and understand how to fix something that’s broken. We pull all the subject matter experts in, figure out what they need to do, and then we create a process around that and deliver technology to solve that process. And when we sit here today, we have over 100,000 people that have created an account for MyCity, and over 40,000 people that's received childcare through the MyCity program.

MyCity was talked about by Mayor Adams on the campaign trail as a one-stop shop to access city benefits. As you mentioned, it started out with child care. There’s also some information about business licensing and job training. But can you give us an update on, three years in, how close is MyCity to becoming an actual one-stop shop for other kinds of benefits? 

It’s a process much like human development – crawl, walk, run, jump. What we did was we found a service that was critical, it being childcare, and we brought that in first. And as part of that process, we created a foundation level of architecture that we could use to repeat to bring other services in. … And now that we’re in the space, childcare may have been the first service that’s delivered, but it’s not the last. We are pushing forward into that to the housing space. There's a lot of housing benefits the city issues, and some of those processes are cumbersome for the people that have to do it. So simplifying some of that and using the information that you provide for any one application to fuel other applications are going to be big. But one of the things I’m most excited about is recently, we put a benefits eligibility checker as part of MyCity portal. And one of the places that I want to get to is using MyCity to do pre-approvals for public benefits. 

Is there a timeline to expanding MyCity to include housing benefits applications?

So we have a roadmap that takes us through the end of the year, and then a strategic roadmap that takes us across the next two years. We expect within the next two years to have multiple services brought in. In addition to housing, we’ve got other things like financial benefits and tighter integrations with some of our other core systems AccessHRA and stuff like that.

Are there plans to use the MyCity portal’s AI chatbot for any other city websites or services? 

We’re currently expanding scope to go beyond small business, to include all the content that comes from 311. … Currently over 70% of the calls that come into 311, they’re not service requests. What that means is that over 70% of the calls are calls for information. So if we can serve the information calls better, faster, and we can free up our agents to take more critical calls and reduce wait times, that's where we want to leverage the chatbot to help us assist in that. And it’s more than just putting it in text, but bringing in a voice component and giving people capabilities to interact with it on-demand, both online and through the phone.

How are glitches with the chatbot being worked out?

It’s like any new technology that you adopt – you’re always going to come across something that you may not expect. But it’s recovering fast and updating and pushing forward. When we launched the chatbot, there was an article that came out. Someone was asking it compounded questions that the chatbot wasn't really optimized for. There was an article that came out and says, New York City’s chatbot, when you seek guidance around tips, it says that restaurant owners can take the tips of their employees. Obviously, that’s not something that New York City would push. And the requests thereafter immediately came in: take the chatbot down. That doesn’t really make much sense. How about we fix it? So two weeks later, we put a patch in place, and then we put a condition in place where anyone that asks anything outside the scope – redirect them and say it's not within the scope, NYC.gov is another place where you can get information, so on, so forth. And since then, the amount of hallucinations that we saw using the chatbot have gone down exponentially. And like we say, we serve thousands of people daily using the chatbot. And we feel like if we can add the 311 content in it, it will help more people even quicker.

That brings us more generally, to the AI Action Plan, which was announced in October 2023. I know that’s ongoing work, and there are timelines built into that plan. But can you give an update on what there is to show for that work at this point? How close is the city to having a comprehensive AI policy?

We’re getting closer by the day. I think government’s overall process when it comes to adopting new technologies is like, if it’s new and I don’t understand it, let’s regulate it and let’s throw crazy regulations on top of it. And the other side of it is like, anything that has the word AI, let’s adopt it, it sounds cool, let’s bring it in. What we wanted to do as we shifted our investments into the artificial intelligence space, we wanted to do it in a smart way that leveraged talent and the experience of many of you that are in this room and across industry. So instead of being on a mountain and scaling the AI mountain by ourselves, we decided to form a couple of committees that could act as a (guide) to help us, guide us up the mountain. We’ve established an AI advisory committee where we have talent from academia, from big tech, and talent from within the city that talks about the areas where we want to invest, see if it’s smart ways to invest. And then we have an internal governance council made up of all city leadership. So as we make decisions around the areas and the policies we want to make, we have a focus group built of different industries within the city that can help us moderate those policies to make sure it’s reflective of what everybody wants. … So of the 37 things committed in the plan, we’ve delivered 31 of them ahead of schedule. And we’re on track to have a comprehensive policy within the year. 

One of the steps in that plan that was actually delayed was establishing a directory of procured AI tools and guidance on their use. Do you have an update on when that is coming?

Part of that is when we look at automated decision making and things that fall within that space, everyone’s understanding of that may not be the same. So one of the things that we saw when we did our initial round of collection, we saw that there were things that we knew that existed that weren’t a part of the catalog. And then we had to go back and sort of corral agencies and say, ‘Well, what about all these other things?’ So within the year, we’re expecting to have a policy, a list of tools that we use that are in the space, and a list of projected investments that we plan to invest within the next year in – in terms of capabilities, not companies.

How much do you rely on the work of past administrations? There was an Automated Decisions Task Force established during the de Blasio administration that studied how those kinds of tools are used. Are you pulling that sort of legacy knowledge into your work today? Or do you start over with each administration on this work?

I think some of it carries forward, but there are certain areas where you see philosophical differences. … I think with some of the legacy administration’s work, a lot of people are passionate about their ideas and about delivery in the ways that they expect it, but the flexibility of adjusting their understanding and modifying it for new and perhaps more innovative ways, it’s not always there. From the human capital side, we have a mix of new talent plus old talent that are working on these things. In terms of old work products with places like (the algorithms management and policy officer) and all those folks, we use their work products as baselines because it has some of the information that we need. But one of the things that we also noticed was that compliance was very poor around what people actually submitted. If you issue guidance and you say that people have to comply and they have to provide information, if you don’t have any teeth behind the request, people will ignore it. And I think with the creation of OTI, we’ve now gotten stronger legs. So when we ask for something, people are more inclined to comply and provide the information. So the short answer to your question is, we use the old stuff as a foundation where we can and then we layer the new stuff on top. In some cases, some of the old stuff is like a house with a rotten foundation – you have to tear it down and rebuild.

To the question of human capital and attracting talented professionals to lower paying public sector work – how much is that a challenge that harms your ability to execute new projects quickly or efficiently? MyCity has heavily relied on outside vendors. Do you have the staff to do more in house work?

The emphasis around in-house development is something that I don’t pay as much attention to. What I look at is lost opportunities to help the people that need it. Being in public service, we’re put here by the people of the city to do the work that’s in the greatest interest of the people in the city. And this is one of those areas where you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes, when necessary, you have to push forward using whatever talent that you can secure. In terms of what we’re doing around longevity and sustainability, we’ve done things like create a Cyber Academy so that we could be the master of our own destiny for our cyber workforce. We’re doing the same thing for citywide tech leadership. We have a tech Leadership Academy, which will be coming out, so that we can continue to build tech leaders within the city. We don’t really have a problem attracting talent, where we have a problem is retaining talent. So when you come to the city, you get access to a lot of technology that very few places actually have, especially bleeding-edge tech. And what happens is people build capabilities, those capabilities are highly profitable outside the city and outside of public service, and people opt in and they leave public service. And those that believe in mission stay behind. We’re doing a better job at looking at how we can retain talent, how we can increase pay and remain competitive with the private sector.