Prince William County, Virginia, just rolled out an AI 311 service that answers resident questions by phone, text, chat, and email, any time, day or night. No more guessing which office handles a broken streetlight or a trash pickup mix-up. Residents just ask.
The old system asked a lot of people. Residents had to know which county department to call. They needed to know when that office was open. And they had to word their question just right so someone would understand it. That’s a real barrier for anyone juggling a job, kids, or a language other than English.
Inside the AI 311 Service
The county built its new assistant, named “Will,” to handle typed questions across text, email, and web chat. A companion voice tool called “Willow” answers phone calls, so residents who’d rather talk than type still get quick help. Both tools pull answers only from trusted county sources, not the open internet. That means residents get accurate information instead of a guess.
The results show up in the numbers. County staff say the tool’s “apology rate,” how often it fails to give a useful answer, fell from 25% to 11%. That’s a huge cut in the number of times a resident hits a dead end. The county also expanded the range of requests the system can handle, from 35 service types to 50, covering everything from utility questions to code enforcement complaints.
Since launch, the AI 311 service has fielded more than 64,000 resident interactions. Take a resident like Marcus, a shift worker in Woodbridge, who used to wait until his lunch break to call the county about a downed tree limb, only to sit on hold and get transferred twice. That’s 64,000 times someone got an answer without sitting on hold, driving to a county office, or hunting through a confusing website at 9 p.m. trying to report a problem before bed.
“Residents should not have to understand the internal structure of the County government to get help,” said Katherine Hanson, the county’s 311 operations technical lead. That line captures the real shift. Local government has long asked residents to learn its org chart before they can get anything done. This tool flips that: the county adapts to residents, not the other way around.
A Pattern Taking Hold in Local Government
Prince William County isn’t working alone on this. Washington, D.C. built its own DC Compass chatbot to help residents find answers in city data instead of digging through PDFs. Honolulu went a different direction and used AI to cut building permit wait times nearly in half. Different problems, same idea: use AI to remove friction between residents and the help they’re already entitled to.
The county also treats this as ongoing work, not a finished project. Staff review every question the AI can’t answer. They use those gaps to fix county web content, search tools, and service pathways. Each missed question becomes a fix for the next resident who asks it.
For the people who actually use it, the payoff is simple. Less time on hold. Fewer transfers between departments. A government that gives a straight answer to a straight question, whenever someone asks it, even at midnight.
Read more in Prince William County and Citibot’s announcement.