The Buzz with ACT-IAC
The Buzz with ACT-IAC
ICYMI: The Future of AI Powered Digital Services
Angy Peterson explore the transformation of customer experience, with highlights from a recent ACT-IAC CX Summit event. Angy Peterson, VP of the Experience Group at Granicus, shares her journey from newspaper design to helping government agencies build digital-first services. She delves into the potential of AI in government services, reflecting on how it can reshape experiences from convenience to deeper connection and collaboration. Key insights include the need for structured data, proactive content management, and the paradigm shift toward omnichannel, AI-powered interactions. Peterson emphasizes that the future lies in smart systems and richer conversations that truly understand and serve constituents.
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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound
(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)
HOST: [00:00:00] Hey there, and welcome back. I'm your host Joanna Baez, and I'm super thrilled you're joining us today. A few weeks ago, ACT IAC held a really great customer experience event, and for those of you who might've missed it, we've got you covered in this session. Angie Peterson, VP of the Experience Group at granicus shares personal anecdotes and industry insights.
HOST: I hope you're inspired. As we explore the future of customer experience together,
MARTHA DORRIS: welcome back. I hope everybody enjoyed their lunch. We do have one administrative announcement. We have found a pair of glasses. We've located the owner of the lost phone, but now we have glasses. So if you've lost your glasses, um, check with, um, Jillian raising her hand over here, and, um, you can now see the rest of the day.
MARTHA DORRIS: So, uh, as you think, plan and strategize today, we're also. Thinking about the future and what it looks like [00:01:00] and what are the possibilities to share her thoughts, please welcome Angie Peterson, vice President of the Experience Group at Granicus. Welcome, miss Angie. Do you have pockets? That's what we wanna know.
MARTHA DORRIS: Do you have pockets in your No, I know. No
ANGY PETERSON: pockets today.
MARTHA DORRIS: I
ANGY PETERSON: almost had pockets. Thank you, Martha. Uh, okay. So my voice sort of. It ConEd out on me a couple days ago, so I'm gonna hold tea today and hope for the best. I've got tea. I'm good. I'm gonna be good, but please bear with me. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?
ANGY PETERSON: Better do I have to hold this thing? Oh boy. Okay. And is there a clicker up here too? There's no clicker.
MARTHA DORRIS: Hmm? Your laptop. No,
ANGY PETERSON: I do not have my laptop up here. There's the clicker. Oh, this is gonna be fun.
MARTHA DORRIS: There might be a handheld over there that you [00:02:00] could use.
ANGY PETERSON: Oh, maybe I'll do that. That's easier. I like a good pivot.
ANGY PETERSON: How's that work? Perfect. Good teamwork. Making the dream work. Thanks everyone. Okay. Hi everyone. I, uh, am really happy to be here today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining me after lunch, the always popular time when everyone's still just sort of coming up for air, but bear with me.
ANGY PETERSON: I'm gonna try to make this a little entertaining. Um, I started my career way back when as a newspaper designer, which I know makes me sound really old at this point. Uh, but back then experience design was about getting people to follow the story from the front page inside to page 11. Uh. And, you know, for years that industry faced huge cultural and organizational and workflow cha changes.
ANGY PETERSON: Um, to move from that print first publishing to the, you know, data-driven [00:03:00] multi-channel, always on delivery that we're used to today and now at Granicus for about. Six or seven years now, I, I help government agencies with similar transformation challenges, designing services and aligning our teams to help our government only customers create digital first and self-serve experiences.
ANGY PETERSON: So I'm here today, as Martha was saying, to talk to us and help us all imagine the future of AI first government services. Um, it's a daunting topic. It's a daunting topic for an experienced designer. I'm not a technologist and. Anything I say today is gonna be outta date next year and probably laughable in the year 21, 25.
ANGY PETERSON: Um, but stopping to imagine the possibilities and really believing in our collective power to dream is a critical step to drive change. So to get ready for today, I turn to a little inspiration. Let's see if I can get this to go.[00:04:00]
ANGY PETERSON: No man, that's the way it's gonna go.
ANGY PETERSON: Uh, the Jetsons, uh, it might be silly, but uh, I like to understand where we've been before I start to talk about where we're going and think about where we're going. And sometimes that's even just understanding what we used to allow ourselves to imagine. I loved the show as a kid, I'm not gonna lie. Um, it was sort of this magical world created in 1962, but set in 2062 and somehow this perfect little blend of both.
ANGY PETERSON: Um, watching it again now, uh, I was delighted to see the familiar moving walkways like we have in pretty much every airport in America at this point. The video phone call home to mom. Hello. FaceTime Zoom teams. The flying cars, [00:05:00] we are not quite there yet, but we're really close with drones and self-driving cars.
ANGY PETERSON: The show imagined robot maids, instant meals, transportation shoots to get kids to school, seemingly magical gadgets, right to make chores or tasks easier. Uh, it seemed both revolutionary and dated when I watched the show as a kid in the eighties. But watching the show now in 2025, through my lens as an experienced strategist, I was struck by how the Jetsons really only imagined convenience and they did not imagine a whole new way of life.
ANGY PETERSON: Right? At its core, the show featured a white middle class family, two kids, a dog, mom at home, using technology to make household chores easier. Dad going to work to literally push a button to support the family. Uh, no people of color, no new social order, no new dynamics at play. Technology made chores and [00:06:00] tasks easier maybe, but it did not reimagine this version of the American Dream.
ANGY PETERSON: In fact, it just reinforces stereotypes. And this is a risk we must all guard against, right? If we only imagine within the dynamics and constraints that we know. Then we risk creating a future with those same constraints. Many of us here today have spent decades responding to the digital revolution. Oh, we got zoomed in.
ANGY PETERSON: Maybe they'll zoom 'em back out for me. We've been building a digital powered government by putting information on the web, adding apps, launching social channels, moving forms online, and digitizing tasks. With ai, we're beginning another whole new paradigm shift. As we've heard about a lot this morning. I encourage all of us to keep thinking bigger about what the very near future could hold.
ANGY PETERSON: This community has spent years moving from a focus on tools to a focus on. [00:07:00] Experience from customer service to human-centered customer experience to now an omni-channel Total experience for both staff and the public
ANGY PETERSON: with new eos and direct is setting an increasingly clear vision for a whole of government approach to manage customer experience. To modernize technology and to promote interoperability between agency networks and systems, and unify and improve the usability and aesthetics of our digital government.
ANGY PETERSON: With ai, we're closer now than ever to this vision for a unified, transparent, and truly citizen centered government that builds public trust. And this one's gonna be funny. I hope this paradigm shift started back in the 19 hundreds when we started putting information online. Static websites designed first for publishing information, later for selling a product or service.
ANGY PETERSON: New containers and constructs and channels for content, but no longer just in print. Now [00:08:00] we had websites. Email and social. We have chat rooms and community forums and dating apps. I didn't get the sound embedded in this one, but to this day, when I hear the dial up, I am instantly transported back to late nights with my best friends trying to sort through the latest a OL chat room and talking to strangers online.
ANGY PETERSON: But all along the way, government agencies have adopted new ways to deliver information and services, but web and digital channels are still primarily used as that one way delivery of information, and still primarily separate systems with no consistent data, as we've heard a lot about today. And with the amount of content and policies to navigate and the need for multiple languages and requirements for accessibility and a lagging, centralized strategy for human centricity, it's all added up to a really complex maze for any one person to navigate.
ANGY PETERSON: Okay, so to prep for today, I watched The Jetsons. [00:09:00] I also attended a talk with Jeff Woods. And if there's any way we could zoom my slides back out, I would really appreciate it. Uh, thank you. I trust still happen. Um, I also attended a talk with Jeff Woods. He is the author of the AI Powered Leader. Um, oh, great.
ANGY PETERSON: It worked. Thank you. He used, uh, AI to grow a market or to grow a company, excuse me, from a market cap of 750 million to 12 billion. In four years, which is just an unbelievable amount of growth and scale in such a short period of time. He is a big proponent of many of the things we've been talking about this morning, um, using AI for not just the task efficiencies and automation approaches like from the Jetsons, but to instead use AI to free people up from those machine-based tasks to focus on being more human.
ANGY PETERSON: A concept, I know many of my fellow experienced strategists in the room can relate to. Okay, [00:10:00] now I've been doing my own. My own work as a leader to diligently adopt AI In my day-to-day work, I am giving copilot or chat GPT, all the context I can. I'm assigning it a role in all of my prompts. Um, but Woods's crit framework, uh, unlocked a whole new concept for me and it's this third part here, the interview, um, asking AI to ask me questions.
ANGY PETERSON: I dunno if any of you have gotten to that yet, but. The notion of asking AI to ask me a question one at a time. To go deeper, uh, to get to richer context, um, to take it all in to listen, respond. I've been reading his book, I've been listening to his podcast. I've been trying out the framework and all of it has got me moving from, you know, just the baselines of what we've been talking about.
ANGY PETERSON: Moving from AI as this basic search tool and, you know, the next new Google or an improved version of Google or someone to help write might. You know, emails and next messages. Um, but [00:11:00] instead to start thinking of AI as potentially a collaboration partner, uh, a thought partner, even, um, asking AI to ask me questions and then tasking it to use all the context and all the conversation and all the information it has available to share non-obvious ideas beyond what my context constrained brain would come up with.
ANGY PETERSON: It's been huge and is truly tapped into again, the collective knowledge and collaboration that many people in this room are looking for. Uh, I also talked with our chief product officer and our general manager for emerging technology. They're the brain power behind our new government experience agent.
ANGY PETERSON: Brilliant leaders who've built their careers on understanding highly technical concepts and applications. And they also have encouraged me to think about how this new paradigm. Will require our uniquely human skills to be that much more valuable. So the storytelling, the strategy, the human connection.
ANGY PETERSON: Let's take even [00:12:00] the one way digital content delivery I was talking about earlier. The websites, uh, the ways of publishing from the past 30 years. All of that's going to be completely different in, let's say a model context, protocol world where we don't even need APIs to connect systems, but we will need curiosity.
ANGY PETERSON: Creativity, uh, and collaboration. That ability to actually get people around aligned around a single vision, that's not something that AI can do on its own.
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ANGY PETERSON: We are very proud. Let's see if I can get the clicker to go. Maybe,
ANGY PETERSON: man, it's not my day. Well, it'll come back.
ANGY PETERSON: Oh, this is good.
ANGY PETERSON: Now you get to see the full screen.
ANGY PETERSON: Maybe it'll play. It'll be okay. Oh, there it is going. Uh, we are very proud of the government experience agent that we've launched. Um, for our government customers. We are helping agencies to organize their content as we've been talking about. It's critical to have your content structured in a way. That the AI can actually use [00:14:00] and that we can create trust with.
ANGY PETERSON: Validate that for accuracy, ensure the collaboration across the business functions and IT and customer service teams. Our agent can interpret plain language statements as questions, can direct a taxpayer to the right page with the right information, can answer follow up questions, and understand different ways of engaging, like even just a simple thumbs up as a response.
ANGY PETERSON: Agentic AI is no longer about predefined logic, and it's also not just about asking questions or having the right context. It's about having richer conversations. Okay. Last one. I see how my clicker goes. Okay, great. Uh, to get ready for day. I also listen to, as I often do, the Mel Robbins podcast. She's. The best.
ANGY PETERSON: I was listening to the episode with Dr. Allison Woodbrook. She's a professor at Harvard Business School, um, a researcher, author, and really one of the world's leading experts on the science of communications. And her opening [00:15:00] line in that podcast really kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. Every relationship in your life is a repeated sequence of conversations over time.
ANGY PETERSON: Think about it. With your partner or your best friend, or your favorite coworker, the relationships you've been. Been building through a series of increasingly richer conversations where you listen, you respond, and then you even get to that really magical place where you can start to anticipate what the other person's gonna say, and you complete each other's sentences because you've known each other so long and you've built such rich conversations.
ANGY PETERSON: You build trust and connection with each new exchange and each new experience of feeling seen, feeling heard. She got me thinking about how critical conversation is to building relationships and connection. She also has a framework, uh, as part of her popular class at Harvard Business School. She teaches this framework to help leaders of the future learn to be better [00:16:00] communicators.
ANGY PETERSON: Uh, you can see it starts with topics, the things we talk about, like AI experience, data, lunch, how our kids are doing at school, what we're doing for the weekend, how to pay my property taxes, or where to enroll in a new healthcare plan. But please note again the second one there, uh, asking. Ask more questions, ask better questions, uh, ask the questions.
ANGY PETERSON: Listen, go deeper, stay in context, and stay connected. And all of this altogether has me thinking about how the new paradigm of AI powered digital services for government will be about personalized, on demand context, rich container agnostic conversations. Instead of just answering questions with predetermined logic or making tasks more efficient, AI will help government agencies listen, learn, and respond in real time [00:17:00] across languages and channels and systems.
ANGY PETERSON: We've democratized publishing. We've moved services online, and we now are beginning to democratize one of our most uniquely human capabilities Dialogue. It's not about automation, it's about human connection. So how do we get there? Get my clicker to work. There we go. Uh, AI is only as good as the data and content that fuels it.
ANGY PETERSON: We've heard that all morning, unstructured data, managing it, making sure we get to a place that it's been validated, trusted, verified. Um, if we're not careful, we'll accelerate bad information or scale a bad experience because the underlying data is so messy. In a recent study we conducted with Gov Exec 37, excuse me, 57% of federal agency respondents named poor Data governance.
ANGY PETERSON: As a top obstacle, more than cost and more than security, and only 6% of [00:18:00] federal respondents believe their agency's data is fully structured and AI ready. This is a huge gap to fill. But best practices for AI are the same as they have been for CX and for digital transformation. Use data, use insights to understand the people you're serving, understand them, their demographics, their behavior, their geographics, what their topics are, what their preferences are, and then use that understanding to organize website content to validate that it's timely, accurate.
ANGY PETERSON: Update online forms. Maybe add the multitouch email campaigns. But all in service of knowing your constituents and meeting their needs and their preferences at each touch point. Building that connection and sense of being seen and heard, because let's be clear, content is still king and AI has not necessarily changed that.
ANGY PETERSON: Uh, instead, AI is accelerating the need for agencies to proactively manage content across [00:19:00] channels and to ensure consistency, accuracy, timeliness, and clarity. We've heard a lot of already today about the need to do the work to update the legacy content, um, to just dive in and get it, to get it validated, to establish an enterprise approach to data management and governance, and to design those cross-functional workflows and understand and anticipate user needs.
ANGY PETERSON: Okay. Couple more imagination ideas. Let's imagine the life experience of moving to a new state. Yeah. If I were to do it today, I would fully expect that I have to navigate. Five or six different websites, several different communication signups, all the sorts of things to get my daughters enrolled in school, figure out how to pay my taxes, sign up for a recycling bin in my new neighborhood, all of those different things, but the AI powered service delivery for tomorrow, I will have a continuous conversation going with my personal moving agent who understands my unique context.
ANGY PETERSON: Which state I'm [00:20:00] moving to and which state I'm moving from. Um, guide me seamlessly across the agencies jurisdictions to take the right next step. I can ask for clarification. I'll come back the next day. The context will still be there. The agent might have to pull information from a state agency, maybe from a local agency, and I will never be any of the wiser.
ANGY PETERSON: But I will have the information I need. It's not just a digital front door anymore. It is a dynamic, always on and unified conversational experience. Think about it in your own life now. Uh, keep saying 2025 has been a very disruptive year. It's been stressful year for many of us. Maybe after a long day you come home and you use the Nest app to turn the temperature up to 72 degrees in your house.
ANGY PETERSON: You ask Spotify to turn on your favorite wind down and relax playlist. Um, maybe you light a candle or you launch your favorite [00:21:00] meditation app. But in the very new fu near future, you're gonna be able to say things like. AI or Angie, Angie, ai. I don't know. I need a relaxing experience. And suddenly your entire environment responds.
ANGY PETERSON: The lights dim the temperature, adjust your favorite playlist starts your meditation app launches all working together to create your preferred multisensory wind down experience. And that's the difference between convenience and connection, and that's the future that we can create for government services where systems work together to anticipate needs and deliver seamless experiences.
ANGY PETERSON: So the Jetsons imagined a future of convenience, but the show missed the deeper transformation. Technology's, uh, power to reshape relationships and foster collaboration and build trust. AI really gives us that [00:22:00] opportunity if we use it wisely. Success starts with deep understanding of people always, and a continuous improvement of content and ongoing management of data, not just task automation.
ANGY PETERSON: It's about building systems that learn and evolve with the people they serve. The future isn't just about smarter tools or smarter gadgets. It's about smarter systems in richer conversations, let's use AI to not just automate and optimize, but to build a connected collaborative government. One that listens, learns and evolves with the people it serves.
ANGY PETERSON: Because if we get this right, the next generation won't just have flying cars. They'll have a government that truly understands them. Thank you.
HOST: If you're passionate about technology and eager to explore more incredible events, make sure to visit act iac.org/upcoming-events. Keep your curiosity sparked and your calendars marked. [00:23:00] Until next time, stay inspired and connected.