What’s Working: Cities like Denver want AI to handle boring, tedious tasks

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Quick links: Mayor’s migrant/AI challenge | Colorado’s $14M quantum campus | Colorado unemployment rate up to 4% | Interest rate cut | Take the poll: AI in your life?

When it comes to adopting artificial intelligence Technology for the city of Denver, the potential misuse or harm caused to consumers is top of mind. But sometimes, the boring stuff is what attracts the attention of someone like Mayor Mike Johnston, who with his team dreamed up this week’s DenAI Summit.

“I think the places where we find the greatest concerns are around things like national security and warfare, and particularly around personally identifiable Health information or other data,” Johnston said. “But we think there are much simpler use cases that we can adopt earlier.”

Take for example, Boltwise, he said. The Denver startup uses AI to identify nuts, bolts, fasteners and other hardware that professional contractors need for bids, quotes and construction projects. In an industry where contractors typically describe what they need, the apparently wide inability to nail down the exact nut could delay a project. AI takes the descriptions to find the right items without the back-and-forth or guesswork.

“If you saw Boltwise, they’re changing the way you prioritize ordering nuts and bolts — literally nuts and bolts — that can be much simpler, much faster than having someone from our general services team have to run down to Home Depot every couple days and search for 75 new bolts,” Johnston said. “We think these are the kind of easy, compelling innovations that will make the city run more smoothly.”

The city is also “having conversations” with CivCheck to pilot AI tech that would speed up the city permitting process.

“We are piloting an AI tool on permitting intake right now, which is when you just apply for a permit. Often it takes eight days for us just to intake, which is just to give us your name and info and the rest,” he said.

CivCheck relies on AI to make sure applicants fill out forms completely and correctly. The Boston company’s AI software helped the city of Honolulu reduce plan review time by 70% by educating applicants, finding code coNFLicts and prescreening so city staffers didn’t waste time with incomplete or noncompliant forms.

Could AI have helped Denver’s migrant influx?

But here’s one use case that Johnston put out for any interested AI startup: help with the migrant crisis. Thousands of immigrants arrived in the city in the past year and needed help filing asylum claims, which can be a 40-hour legal process, he said. That meant they needed translators and attorneys, not to mention the individual must fill out numerous state and federal forms.

“This would be a great place where there could be an AI tool to do this,” he said. “Someone could give a 20-minute interview and we could just say, tell us your story, how you got here, where you came from, what the experience was.”

AI would then translate it from Spanish to English and fill out the appropriate spots in the 40-page questionnaire. Then instead of a lawyer working with the applicant and translator to do the interview and fill out the form over dozens of hours, it could take just one hour.

“We could 100X the number of asylum claims we could have done,” he said. “We would have used just as many immigration attorneys but just would have been able to use their time more efficiently. … These are places where technology solutions could be win-win.”

Someone needs to build it, though, and that’s why DenAI was a worthwhile effort for Denver, he said.

“But if it did exist,” he said, “we would use it.”

Earlier: Artificial intelligence takes center stage at Denver’s inaugural DenAI Summit

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Colorado’s $14 million quantum update

Earlier this week, the state’s quantum Tech Hub had a ceremonial groundbreaking for a 70-acre campus in Arvada, the former home of oil-shale company Tosco and its old 180-foot lift pipe used to research the extraction of oil shale from rocks. But the fresh mound of dirt won’t be where the action will take place. The main operations of the Elevate Quantum Consortium are to the east, where about 60,000 square feet of buildings sit in need of renovation.

Colorado School of Mines paid $14 million for the property and plans to spend another $6 million or so to fix up the site by turning the existing facilities into labs, clean-space fabrication plants and offices. More details of how much money is going into the project is here: “Colorado’s multimillion dollar investment in quantum gets 70-acre campus in Arvada”

Some other bits that didn’t get into the main story:

• Maybell Quantum, the Denver maker of super-cold fridges to slow atomic motion of quantum computers for effective operation, has grown since we last checked. Maybell’s has 50 employees, from 16, and has sold its systems into eight countries — “Should be nine by the end of this week,” said founder Corban Tillemann-Dick on Monday. The company has raised $30 million from venture investments to date, which includes $28 million in a Series A in February.
• The quantum incubator, which the University of Colorado Boulder is working on, has committed $6 million to making it happen, said Massimo Ruzzene, CU’s vice chancellor for research and innovation. Part of the funds “will go to secure a space” off campus, Ruzzene said. “Our commitment would be to provide the space to the consortium so that we can launch it very quickly.” 

• Meanwhile, criteria for the two state quantum business incentives (valued at $74 million) are underway, said Eve Lieberman, executive director of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Only Elevate Quantum is eligible for the tax credits, which would be granted as the organization attracts new companies to open and expand at the Arvada or Boulder sites. Banks can request tax credits for any losses on loans to quantum companies. Quantum businesses are eligible for the state’s regular job-growth incentives, like the job-growth tax credits and Strategic Fund.
• There’s a lot of interest in the U.S. and internationally in the Colorado sites, said Mike Landes, OEDTI’s senior business development manager.  “We’ve heard from a lot of partners in the Netherlands, in Finland and Sweden and Switzerland. These are all major centers for quantum,” said Landes, adding that OEDIT will be promoting the quantum hub during its trip to Taiwan and South Korea in November.  “There’a a lot of quantum markets (in the U.S.) but very few that have the assets and resources that we do.”

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