Little Rock A.I. chatbot to help residents with city services | What to know

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — As artificial intelligence and chatbots become more and more popular, the City of Little Rock has now decided that it was time to use the A.I. technology to its advantage.

During his 2025 State of the City address in March, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. announced that Roxie, the A.I. chatbot for the city, would be launching soon.

At the time of the announcement, the bot was in its pilot stage. Now, it’s available for Little Rock residents to use.

“One of the first things that you can do in Roxie is that there are a couple of prompts when you get started. So if you know that you want to meet with the mayor, there’s an initial prompt as soon as you get into Roxie that allows you to meet with the mayor and set that up, and visit our scheduling portal,” explained Marquis Willis, the Chief Data Officer for the City of Little Rock.

Roxie also helps you with general information, and it can even condense and reduce search times when looking on the city’s website.

Willis is the person who spearheaded the effort to get Roxie up and running and on the city’s website. 

When residents go on the city’s website or other government websites, it could sometimes be overwhelming, but now they have an A.I. assistant who can help them navigate.

“Our website is big, and when you include PDFs, you’re looking at over 20,000 pages worth of information. So, a way that we can condense that was to use artificial intelligence,” Willis described.

With A.I., the time that a website visitor spends to get their information can be significantly reduced. Which is something that Willis said was a reason behind the idea of Roxie.

“We want to reduce the time to find information, but make sure that we’re providing useful data to our residents. Even as Roxie has gone live, we’ve noticed that some prompts trigger inefficient responses,” he said. “So we’re working to reduce that because we recognize that consistent and clean data produces the responses that we want to get out to our residents.”

The process from idea to launch took about five months in total. However, Willis explained that it wasn’t just him, but the effort to get Roxie up and running came from multiple departments within the city.

“It was a lot of collaboration from communications, a lot of collaboration from information technology, the office of executive administration, just the city of Little Rock as a whole. It’s been fun to work on a project that truly encompasses data governance and then data responsibility, to get information out to our residents,” said Willis. “So it’s fun to see an idea go from a concept to actual production, and being glad for our residents to experience.”

The journey to implement A.I. on the city’s website even went outside of just the city itself, to different partners.

“We worked in partnership with Google. We’re very appreciative of them and their work in Sid communication, Sid global. We’re great partners throughout this process. It’s been fun to work with them and leverage that new technology that’s coming out to really get our residents the benefits that they need from an artificial intelligence standpoint,” Willis said.

Roxie can help find where to pay parking tickets, how to file a police report, or even how to make an appointment with the Mayor.

For more information on Roxie, please click here.