Building Trust in the Exponential Age

All right, TGIF! It is Friday, it is in November now. It's hard to believe this year is flying by. Good to see you, Joe.

Thanks, Dustin.

Today we've got a great episode focused on building trust in the exponential age, and I'm really excited about our guest today. It was a few conferences ago we were having coffee together, really talking about, as we think about everything that's happening within AI and within all of these new technologies, you know, really at the core of all of what we're trying to do within the public sector is how to rebuild and regain trust. And so as we started to kind of think about, you know, the big topics going into 2024, trust was definitely one that's top of mind. And every survey and every report that we see, you know, has shown that trust has declined within the public sector, and there's an opportunity to turn this around. And so we thought there is No better person to bring on than Zen City's own CEO, Eyal Federlevy, to discuss why trust is the biggest issue that government should care about and how emerging technologies can empower government and residents to engage more meaningfully to build trust in this new age. So, Eyal, so great to see you. Thanks for hopping on and, and, you know, your willingness to talk about this incredibly important topic.

Thanks, Dustin. Thanks, Joe. It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of In Case You Missed It, so proud to be on.

Longtime listener, first-time guest. Great to have you on. We're big fans of Zen City, and maybe just to start, we'd love to just let you introduce yourself and Zen City to our audience. I know most people know of Zen City, but it would be great to, to make sure you raise awareness for those that it's new to.

Well, I'd love to do that. First and foremost, we're a GovTech 100 company, very proud to be for the last few years, but we are a startup company based in Tel Aviv, and in Brooklyn, New York. And our goal, to put it simply, is to help local governments build trust with the communities that they serve, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But we've been around for almost 7 years, and today I'm proud to say we're the largest community engagement platform out there. We serve a little bit over 150 million people through over 300 cities, counties, state agencies that we work with, from LA, Chicago, and Phoenix all the way to tiny communities like DeLand, Florida. And I think what we've been very, very interested in is how emerging technologies can help this key issue of building trust. We were very privileged to be on the CB Insights AI 100 list, which is the list of the top companies working on AI in the world last year, the first GovTech company to be on it. And I'm excited to Talk about this buzzword that's hovering around us of AI today and how it can help this issue.

Yeah, I love that. Well, one quick follow-up for, uh, tell us a little bit about how you got into this and, you know, how, like, maybe a little bit of the inception story even of Zen City would be great.

Sure. So, uh, I'm an urban planner by profession. I spent most of my career in government, and, uh, I've, uh, as part of that, had the, the opportunity to participate in a lot of, uh, community engagement meetings. Have you guys ever been in a town hall meeting?

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Well, we are the unique few who actually attend those ones. At Destiny, we call this the STP problem, the same 10 people that always show up to every community engagement meeting. And I felt this big dissonance working as a planner between hearing from the mayor, the city manager, how important it is to get community input, how much we need to align everything that we're doing with community input, and the fact that the tools that we had on hand were very, very limited. We basically were out there to organize meetings or call people up for phone surveys or, you know, mail people a survey physically to their home, and all of that constituted what we felt was a very, very high bar. Like, I asked my friends, why are you not showing up? And they were saying, hey, we don't have 3 hours this evening to come and join a meeting about bike lanes in our neighborhood. So my co-founder Ido and I started talking about how can we do this differently and saw that there's a lot of opportunity to leverage basically emerging technologies. Back then it was, we called it machine learning and not AI, and people's online presence to really reach much wider crowds and hear from many, many more people than what some of our traditional tools were, were able to do. We started playing out with that. Uh, the first thing we did was online sentiment analysis, like social media analysis, and over time expanded our toolset to a few other capabilities. Um, and, uh, that's how it came to be.

That's great. You know, I think Dustin mentioned that on our intro, I think we've all seen various studies that show whether it's at the federal government level, the state government level, even the local government level, we've seen this decline in trust in our institutions, whether that's government, whether that's education, or even in banking and many others. But looking more specifically at government, we have seen that decline. Why do you think that that is happening and how can it be reversed?

So first, I think we all agree on this call that state and local governments are super important institutions, right? They're in charge of our public safety, our public health, our infrastructure, transportation, so many of the the things that make up our day-to-day lives. And what we hear again and again from the leaders that we work with is that trust is a super important currency in order to provide all these services. Like, for example, if people don't trust their police department, they don't report crime, they don't cooperate with investigations. If people don't trust their county public health department, they don't show up to get vaccinated when there's a vaccination push. And To your point, Joe, the data that we're seeing about trust declining is, is really scary. You know, only 1 in 3 Americans today highly trust their local government. So the vast majority of Americans don't have a high degree of trust in this institution that provides them all of these crucial services. But more than that, it's declining fast. It used to be that local government is a safe haven of trust while, you know, national politics were always polarized. we saw an almost 10% decline year over year in the last 3 years in the level of trust in local government. So not only is it low, it's also trending in the wrong direction.

Mm-hmm.

And our read to why this is happening is because a lot of the things that we used to see on a national level are making their way downstream into local politics, whether it's partisanship, whether it's polarization, whether it's, you know, the hate speech without showing up. A lot of these things are seeping more and more into city councils and county boards and are pushing people away from this level of government, unfortunately.

So, you know, how do you see this trust dynamic impacting the delivery of services? You know, because I know that when we think about trust, It's not just a nice-to-have, it actually has kind of a core aspect on the way that we deliver services and the way that we're able to better support constituents. You know, how would you say that that impacts the delivery and why this is really just such a hot topic public sector leaders should care about?

Basically, I think any public sector leader that you ask will tell you that you can't do anything meaningful without your community trust. It could literally be that you can't do it, right? A lot of the things we do in government are dependent on people, you know, agreeing to show up and agreeing to participate. But it could just make things really hard. Like, every city manager I ever spoke to had a story of how a small organized group of residents protested against a big capital project they were pushing or a big policy change they were pushing and generated that lack of trust as to the intentions of the city and made that project disappear. And we spoke about some of the other examples. And as cities are facing some of the biggest challenges they've ever faced, right, the infrastructure bill that allows us to invest a generational investment into improving our city's infrastructure, the challenges with trust in law enforcement, the challenges around still, you know, recovering economically and health-wise from the pandemic. not having communities participate and take part and trust the policies that are being led by local government puts a real stick in the wheel, if you will.

Absolutely. So you've got a new platform, Zen City 360. Maybe you could kind of briefly describe to us how that platform is helping communities address some of those challenges. that they're confronting by that lack of trust?

So our belief is simple. We've talked to so many leaders and asked them, how— what has been successful for you in building trust? Like, how did you manage to reverse this curve that we're seeing in the data? And Dan Ault, our customer in the town of Cary, North Carolina, had a great sentence that I really, really, really appreciated. He said that in his perspective, trust is built by continuously meeting and exceeding community expectations, right? Like, imagine that if you're, as an organization, if you're hitting the mark of what your community expects from you and you're doing that again and again and again, that is what eventually builds trust and gives you the capital, the, you know, the opportunity to continue operate with your community's trust. And what we've seen is that the biggest gap to doing that is actually understanding what the community cares about, actually having a real, a confident read of what are your community's needs, priorities. Because when we hear just from those STPs, those same 10 people, not only are we not getting the full view of what our community cares about, we're getting a skewed view of a very specific group, usually, you know, older, whiter, more affluent, more connected to government that show up to have their voices known. And And if we act on that input, sometimes we're not only not building trust, we're hurting trust because we're pushing in the wrong direction of what the majority of our community expects. So our focus has been on how can we more accurately understand the needs and concerns of communities, and what we found is that there's just a really, really exciting opportunity to do that with new technology, right? Today, 94% of Americans are active online regularly. That doesn't mean they have the newest iPhone, doesn't mean they have broadband at home, We all know the digital divide exists, but everybody is active. Could be on social media, it could be on a news website, could be playing Candy Crush, could be reading, you know, the Bible app in their native language, but 9.5 out of 10 people in the US are active online regularly. And so when we think about meeting people where they are, meeting them online is where they are. By the way, an average American spends 7 hours a day in front of a screen. So this is where we are, whether we like it or not. Second, we think that if we mix a few different ways to, to participate, not just the meeting, not just the survey, right, if we mix a few different ways to allow different people to engage in different levels of commitment, we can hear from more people. And third, AI could really play a big part in helping us understand all the feedback we collect if we're actually able to hear from more people. Like in LA, for example, we collect 1.3 million comments per month. You can't humanly navigate 1.3 million comments and make sense out of them. We have to have better tools to make sense. So our 360 platform tries to embody these 3 principles, if you will. We collect data from people by leveraging their online access through sentiment analysis, through surveys that we send online with technology we developed, through online engagement platforms. We bring all that in, into one database, and then we use some really cool AI capabilities to make sense out of all that and give some policy recommendations to our partners and customers.

I love that. I love the acronym STP, the same 10 people. I think you had more people in your meetings than me because mine would be the same 2 people, but—

It works still.

Still a big issue though, and I think it's great that you're finding ways to leverage technology to kind of bring that in. You know, one kind of follow-up to that is how are you seeing agencies leverage this data, right? Because I think when we think about the context of like doing a normal survey or like, you know, asking people to speak and give public comments in a meeting, it's harder for them to act on the data and to do something with it. So like, what are, you know, or have you seen any of your clients that are like leveraging this and building those feedback loops and really leveraging it to inform kind of their, you know, approaches to delivering services differently? I'd love to, you know, maybe hear any bright spots or examples you have.

100%. So let me give you an example from Normal, Illinois. A lot of cities in the last few years have been dealing with how do we leverage this unique opportunity of federal funding, right? There was the CARES Act and ARPA and now the infrastructure bill. These are sometimes generational opportunities to, to make meaningful impact on our communities. And when the town of Normal approached this challenge, They were trying to make a more informed decision as to how to invest these resources, not just, you know, go at who's, you know, the squeakiest wheel, who's shouting the strongest, but how can we really make a decision? So they leveraged both looking at online conversations that were taking place to recognize what were the emerging trends that people were talking about, where were people sharing pain points, and out of that they created a shortlist of priorities that the city could potentially invest in. And on that shortlist, they ran a representative survey with us. And that mixing of both the online sentiment and the representative survey was a really great way to both get in tune with areas of policy that the city was not aware of, and then run a survey that they could get some hard data to make sense of it. But what was really interesting is that when they took the survey results, our surveying capability, which leverages online access, was able to oversample communities of color that were historically marginalized in that community. And the city council decided that they don't want to take necessarily just the general population prioritization of investment, they wanted to take that specific community's prioritization. So they were able to dig into that specific demographic and say we're going to invest in alignment with the priorities of our Black and brown communities first and foremost, and that will be our scorecard to how to allocate ARPA funding. So this entire cycle of being able to recognize the emerging issues and be in tune with what, you know, tens of thousands of people were sharing, building that list of priorities and getting some hard scientific data around it, and then making a decision that is not necessarily, you know, just the top-line decision, but being able to dig into the data and make an equitable decision, I think was a very, very interesting example.

You know, earlier you mentioned the possibilities around new exciting technologies, and one of those technologies is AI, which Justin and I seem like we're talking about, you know, daily, and if not several times a week. When you look at emerging technologies such as AI and generative AI, are those 2 technologies something that can make trust building harder or easier?

First and foremost, I think generative AI is the, you know, is a huge revolution. Dustin and I were talking about this a few weeks back, and I, you know, we think it's an iPhone moment, right? It's like, it's like a moment of, of, of a generational shift. And I think, I don't know if you were following the, the latest announcements from, uh, OpenAI's Dev Day a few, a few days back, but the speed at which they're moving is, is incredible. And I think that we're very, very soon going to see every application built with AI in the same way that, you know, in the same way we talk about cloud today, right? Like, you theoretically can still do things on-prem, but most things happen on the cloud. In the same way that theoretically you can still do things without AI, but in, you know, in months or a few years, everything will be infused with this incredible capability of generative AI. And I think specifically in government, A, I've seen much faster adoption of this than any other technology that, you know, in the past 10 years that we've been following, I've seen a lot more city officials get excited about this and start doing things with this, which is really interesting. And B, I just think there's such a big opportunity to leapfrog, especially in government, which is such a text-heavy industry, right? We create so much documentation and so much content in government. We need to fill out so much for so many forms and read through, through very, very long documents. And I want to give you just a little example. So we leverage the capabilities of GPT-4 to build what we call an auto setup of an engagement website. Basically, you input a few words and within about 5 minutes you get a fully functioning community engagement website on our Engage platform. And one of the really interesting use cases of that, other than saving, you know, a lot of staff time and resources, is that all of a sudden staff members who were not able to use resources like this before are able to do that. For example, community police officers, a police officer who's in charge of a specific neighborhood or a specific community who spends most of their day out in the field talking to people, never had access to IT resources to set up an engagement website for them before. But all of a sudden we see a lot of our law enforcement customers just before they go into a community meeting, take 5 minutes to set up a website, literally 5 minutes, and they walk into the meeting with a website that has, you know, the, the top points of what their policy is right now, the top issues that they want to hear the community, and a short survey that people can fill out on their phone or tablet while they're at the meeting and give feedback that they can document and show their, um, uh, higher-ranked officers. So it just opens a new toolset, a new set of capabilities to levels of government that didn't exist before. And that's just one tiny example out of the range of capabilities that I believe generative AI can bring to government.

Yeah, it is moving so quick and exponentially changing. Yeah, we've been making GPTs of some of our staff, so that's been a fun exercise. So, you know, easiest question for you today, for those that are listening in and watching, you know, where can they go to learn more about Zen City and all the great work that you're doing in our market?

Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words, and I invite everybody to log into our newly developed website. We just launched a new one around the Zen City 360 platform. It has a lot of materials, both educational materials about generative AI generally and about trust building generally, and of course a lot of information about how our customers and partners and governments across the country have used some of these tools to better serve their communities and build trust. So, uh, very welcome to jump in and also reach out to me directly at eyal@zenicity.io.

Well, Eyal, thanks so much for coming on In Case You Missed It. We look forward to having you back on again in the near future and look forward to seeing all the great things that you do. Until then, everyone have a wonderful weekend.