Civic Roundtable launches AI Answers for public servants

BOSTON, Aug. 12, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Civic Roundtable, the government operations platform connecting public servants with the people and answers they need to achieve their mission, today launched AI Answers.

AI Answers enables users across government agencies and partner organizations to use natural language to query information from integrated systems, including listservs, messaging tools, document repositories, learning management systems, CRMs, and more, making it even easier and faster for public servants to find what they need.

Now, questions like “Who is the best point of contact for ABC Homeless Shelter?”, “What’s XYZ County’s policy on water use?”, or “What cooling centers have availability?” are easily and accurately answered in seconds.

The challenge of finding information across government systems
Government work is inherently collaborative. Cybersecurity officials work with state and federal counterparts, and homelessness coordinators work with public health departments. State Veterans Affairs Departments sit at the intersection of a bevy of services, from educational benefits to healthcare; from housing assistance and job placement programs to interfacing with Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs); from substance abuse treatment programs to claims and benefits assistance — all of which require collaboration with other organizations.

In government, critical information lives across organizations in a bevy of disparate systems that don’t talk to each other — and beyond those systems, too. Mission-critical data lives in email threads, texts, unshared working documents, and view-only, versioned, and immediately outdated shared documents. They live in the minds of the public servant who's been with an agency for thirty years.

As a result, public servants traditionally spend an inordinate amount of time on “the work to do the work and the work,” like searching for information — the latest policy, the best point of contact, or the newest grant opportunity. By consolidating and disseminating information from disparate sources across networks of agencies and partners, Roundtable enables public servants to get fast answers to their most important questions and easy access to the resources they need — giving back time to focus on serving their communities and their mission.

AI Answrs is an evolution of Roundtable’s ability to surface accurate information to public servants from more than 1,500 federal, state, and local agencies.

Introducing AI Answers
AI Answers securely generates instant responses exclusively from vetted sources. Rather than the open internet, AI Answers uses a network of two types of underlying data from systems already connected to Roundtable. The first are foundational data like documents, templates, email attachments, videos, photos, transcripts, and PDF. The second is Contextual Metadata uniquely captured in Roundtable — information like who shared documents, when they were shared, and the conversations that surrounded them.

“With AI Answers, public servants will spend even less time searching for information and more time focusing on the mission of their agency, on making an impact for the communities they serve,” said Madeleine Smith, CEO and co-founder of Civic Roundtable. “By working alongside and getting feedback from public servants, we've built AI functionality public servants can actually use to do their jobs more efficiently. When public servants are on the front lines, every minute saved looking for information is one more minute spent delivering services to the people who need them.”

Public servants can use AI Answers in the course of their daily work and have confidence in the quality and accuracy of information because it’s using a rich set of their own information, along with data from partner agencies and non-governmental organizations.

“AI Answers helps me find resources that may be tagged differently than I would have searched. Saving me time and providing more results,” said Rozan Mitchell, Training Coordinator, Office of Lieutenant Governor, Utah, and AI Answers beta user.

Better government for everyone
Unlike private deployments of frontier models, deploying AI Answers requires minimal effort from IT. AI Answers comes built into Roundtable, ready to use on day one at no additional cost. For government agencies whose technology budgets are shrinking, Roundtable enables them to access advanced technologies that can increase the efficacy of their entire workforce — advanced technologies that are far too often out of reach — ultimately better delivering services with fewer resources.

Notably, Roundtable puts privacy and compliance at the forefront and does not use any government agency’s data — from prompts to outputs — to train AI models. As an added measure of transparency, all responses appear alongside linked citations so public servants can validate information with a click.

Roundtable is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud, and has SOC 2 certification. For more information, visit our Trust Center.

AI Answers is in beta. Learn more here.

About Civic Roundtable
Civic Roundtable is a government operations platform purpose-built for federal, state, and local agencies and their partner organizations. Founded by a team with extensive government experience and the belief that the public sector is a force for good, Roundtable is the foundational technology for a more integrated and effective government.

With Roundtable, wide networks of government agencies and partner organizations can consolidate existing data repositories and disseminate mission-critical information in real time. This transforms coordination by empowering public servants with the information, answers, and peer expertise they need, when and how they need it, to serve their communities.

Backed by General Catalyst and currently serving public servants across 1,500 agencies nationwide, the company emerged from the Harvard Innovation Labs to modernize how millions of government workers across 90,000 agencies achieve their mission. Roundtable is built on AWS GovCloud.

Contact
Civic Roundtable
[email protected]

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