#342 AI for Cities: Reinventing Public Communication and Resident Engagement

Summary

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Embracing Digital Transformation

Episode #342

AI for Cities: Reinventing Public Communication and Resident Engagement

Host: Dr. Darren Pulsipher
Guest: Casey Elliott, CEO of Penny
Release Date: June 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dr. Darren Pulsipher sits down with Casey Elliott, entrepreneur, performer, and CEO of civic-tech startup Penny. The conversation focuses on how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way small to midsize cities communicate with residents, addressing fragmentation and inefficiency while empowering both governments and their constituents in the digital age.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin Story & Background

[01:16–06:33]

• Casey shares how his background in music, theater, and entrepreneurship led him to found Penny. From Broadway tours with his family to business ventures and a passion for local community impact, Casey’s varied experience informs Penny’s resident-focused ethos.
• Notable moment: Darren’s personal connection to Casey’s music and the power of performance to move people.

2. The Communication Crisis in Cities

[07:14–09:35]

• Casey outlines the core problem: city information is spread across fragmented channels—websites, multiple social media platforms, emails—making it difficult for residents to find or rely on a single source.
• Many cities lack dedicated communications staff, leaving city managers to struggle with disjointed processes.

“It’s a communication problem... a channel fragmentation problem. Within social media, you have six different platforms, and within each, you’ve got 10 different pages. It’s kind of chaos.”
— Casey Elliott [07:25]

3. Evolution to an AI-Enhanced Solution

[09:40–12:08]

• Penny was initially conceived as a simplified information distribution system. The emergence of ChatGPT and generative AI quickly inspired the team to rethink their entire approach.
• AI enables a centralized content database and a chat interface that allows residents to obtain direct, accurate answers to questions—removing the need to dig through layers of web pages and PDFs.

"Now this allows us to create a centralized content database so that... you can have all the official information in one place, then you can use AI as a chat layer to then just answer questions directly."
— Casey Elliott [10:14]

4. The Content Management Advantage

[12:18–16:33]

• Instead of slapping chatbots atop messy, outdated sites (which results in “garbage in, garbage out”), Penny’s value lies in structured, well-maintained official inputs.
• AI agents update and manage civic knowledge, keeping answers accurate (“How many chickens can I have?”), referencing official codes, and reducing redundant data.
• The system generates user-friendly, multimodal communications—text, charts, visuals, multiple languages, and even unique formats such as poetry.

“If we’re using AI and we can approach this from more of a knowledge graph standpoint, let’s just ingest the information, let AI do the management part of it.”
— Casey Elliott [13:49]

5. AI as Communicator: Multilingual & Accessible

[16:33–18:28]

• Generative AI’s ability to instantly translate information is a game-changer for cities with diverse populations (case: Afghan immigrants in Sacramento). Residents can get official information in their preferred language or learning style.

"...you can customize the way that the information is delivered. That's so powerful... Because everybody learns differently."
— Casey Elliott [17:28]

6. Keeping Up With Policy and Change

[18:28–20:40]

• The platform manages frequent policy updates, reconciling new ordinances with existing codes seamlessly—useful for any bureaucracy (city, agency).
• AI not only integrates changes but can do so faster and more reliably than manual human processes.

“You can essentially train a really great civic-specific agent that knows how to handle civic information... arguably better than a human does or at a minimum a lot faster.”
— Casey Elliott [19:19]

7. Rethinking Resident Engagement & Push Notifications

[21:43–30:04]

• Penny doesn’t just centralize communication but offers push notifications, customizable by resident interest (e.g., “Notify me of new developments in the city”).
• Residents can also receive daily, weekly, or monthly email summaries. Cities direct people to a single, user-friendly hub rather than chasing them across platforms.

“If you want information, here it is. So it’s more of a meeting in the middle approach than ‘as a city we’re going to try to reach you wherever you are.’ That’s a losing battle.”
— Casey Elliott [28:56]

• Social media “organic reach” is negligible for cities (often <2% of followers), and buying ads is inefficient. Standardizing communication increases efficacy and reliability.

“The organic reach is 2, 6%. If you post something on your page... 26 people of your thousand followers will see that post on average. That's awful.”
— Casey Elliott [25:13]

8. Future Vision: AI as City Communication Assistant

[31:10–32:35]

• The next phase: AI can suggest topics for city communicators to share with residents, based on data, transcripts, and what’s genuinely relevant to the community (not just birthdays or “new dogs at the firehouse”).
• Enhances both the efficiency and meaningfulness of city outreach.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Problem of Channel Fragmentation:
  “If you want more information about XYZ... where do I go? The website is maybe the closest thing to a single source of truth. But not everything that’s on Facebook is on the website and vice versa.”
  — Casey Elliott [08:16]

• On Social Media Ineffectiveness:
  “Don’t pay Facebook to reach your audience.”
  — Casey Elliott [25:55]

• On Resident Personalization:
  “If you hate mobile apps, you can sign up for a summary weekly or monthly email... we’ve given cities the ability to reach residents in a really smart, great user experience kind of way.”
  — Casey Elliott [28:17]

• On Paradigm Shifts:
  “AI has changed that paradigm and so that’s what we’re trying to help cities wrap their head around.”
  — Casey Elliott [23:09]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:16 – Casey's origin story: theater, business, and the seeds of Penny
• 07:14 – The resident problem: city info chaos and channel fragmentation
• 09:40 – The ChatGPT moment and pivot to AI
• 12:18 – Why chatbots aren’t enough: importance of good content management
• 16:33 – Multi-language, multimodal comms—AI’s flexibility for accessibility
• 18:28 – Policy updates and how AI reconciles change
• 25:13 – Why social media is a losing game for city outreach
• 27:58 – Pushing personalized notifications, summary emails
• 31:10 – The future: AI as city assistant for meaningful engagement
• 32:46 – Where listeners can learn more (pennyapp.com)

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Conclusion

Casey Elliott and Dr. Darren Pulsipher explore how authentic digital transformation within the public sector hinges on unifying information, modernizing processes, and using AI to personalize and democratize resident engagement. Penny’s approach—a robust, knowledge-based content management platform powered by AI—signals a shift away from scattershot communication efforts and toward timely, inclusive, and actionable civic engagement.

"If you have that kind of website, that kind of content, which cities do, like this is a perfect solution... AI has changed that paradigm."
— Casey Elliott [23:09]

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For more information: pennyapp.com
Podcast resources: embracingdigital.org

Transcript

[A]

This is where like, agentic AI that is intelligence based, knowledge based is so helpful because you can essentially train a really great civic, you know, specific agent that knows how to handle, you know, civic information. It's like new ordinance, I put that new ordinance in, and it knows exactly where to do it and how to adjust things and where to adjust things.

[B]

Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host on this episode, AI for Cities, Reinventing public communication and resident engagement with Casey Elliott, entrepreneur and CEO of Penny. Casey, welcome to the show.

[A]

Thank you so much, Darren. Thanks for having me.

[B]

Hey, you know, it was a pleasure talking to you. We met it. We met at someone's birthday party, and then I got to talking to your wife. You get your superpower is your wife, by the way, if you don't know that already.

[A]

I agree, man.

[B]

She. She, like, we were talking. I'm like, what? Casey's doing this? This is totally awesome. We've got to talk. Then we talked about it a little bit, and I said, we have to have you come on the show. I think you got something really cool here. But before we do that, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show. And every superhero has a background story, an origin story. So, Casey, let's see if you can top some of the others that I've had on here. I've had people on Mount Everest. I've had marathon runners that ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. So can you beat that? You know, what's your background story, Casey?

[A]

Well, I. I sing. I sing and act. That's. That's. That's. Those are superpowers. I mean, it's not nearly as cool as seven marathons.

[B]

That guy was. That guy was just off his rocker, crazy. I'm just gonna tell you right now. He had a great story and a great interview, but he. I told him, you're. You're just crazy. He goes, well, yeah, man.

[A]

No, it's. It's so cool, actually, to. To get those kind of backstories. I think, like you said, we all have these backstories. And. And it's so interesting. My story, like, you know, I'm a theater kid. Like, in high school, I was super into theater. Went to this acting school in Hollywood for a little while. But, you know, as I got into college, I started as a musical theater major. And then like, about a year in, I was like, you know, What? I don't know if I need a degree in musical theater to, like, do musical theater. And so I continued to take classes and do the shows at Weber State University is where I went to school. But then I realized, like, I'm going to try business out. And so I got into business school and loved it. Absolutely loved it. Weber State University, Northern Utah. It's like there was the perfect size, like, great community connection to entrepreneurs. I had great mentors. I got involved with analyzing businesses with a local venture capitalist and just kind of got the entrepreneurial bug. And so I continued to do theater and music and things while also pursuing this career in business. And right out of school, I got a job with a startup company that I had actually consulted with on the venture capital side of things, saw it as a great opportunity in the edtech space, and started working with him. And then I got an opportunity to go on a Broadway tour. And I thought, gosh, I feel like I need to take this because we had one little kid at the time. Yeah. And I'm like, we're never going to be this young again, and my career's just starting, so maybe this is a good chance to do something crazy like this. So I went and I did that. I toured with Aida. I played the lead, Radha Mae's role in that show. We toured the country for a year, living in hotels. We had a baby. We were together, my wife and my kid, they were on the road with me.

[B]

And.

[A]

And this is like. This is. This was a tour where we were, like, in a different town almost every night. Every other night. It was a lot of moving around.

[B]

Oh, but.

[A]

But it was awesome. You know, like, you work at night, you do the show at night, but during the day, we. We explored. We went to museums and. And explored whatever town we were in. And so it was. It was a lot of fun. But I came back. Do that.

[B]

When you're young, though, you can only do that when your kids are small, right?

[A]

I mean, 100%. Yeah. No, I've got four kids. Yeah, it was. It was the right time. Definitely couldn't do that now, at least until our kids are, like, gone and, you know, out of the house. But, yeah, four kids now. They're all teenagers. But anyway, yeah, I got. I got. After that, I got back into business and into the kind of the startup world. And I. I've. I've kind of just balanced the two my whole career. I started a music group called Gentry. It's a tenor trio that. Darren, you. You were at a house yeah, it was awesome. Recently.

[B]

Yeah. Casey, Casey, you, you should know this about me. My audience knows I cry at the drop of a hat, especially around music. And when you were singing, I was just bawling my head off. So I had to have you come on the show because not very many people. Well, everyone does it to me. So congratulations. You're in a. You're in a, A Very good. And Gentry is awesome, by the way, for those that haven't heard. So thanks.

[A]

Yeah, thank you. Well, and that's of course where you and I met and where my, my wife, who I guess is a really great sales rep because she, she was

[B]

talking about she should be taking a salary there. Casey.

[A]

I'm just saying, honestly, she's, she just hears me talk about it non stop, so she's about as knowledgeable as anybody about it. But yeah, this, you know, I don't, I don't know if you want to get into Penny, but Penny's the thing I've been working on now for three years. It's a startup in the, in the civic tech space. So I, I kind of jumped around.

[B]

Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about Penny specifically, because when, when your wife pitched it to me, I said, hey, this is, this is really cool. And then when we got to talk, I got to get more deep into the technology. I'm a technologist, so I'm like, hey, this is super cool and the ramifications of this. But I want to talk about the problem space first, which is you're really targeting cities, period. You're not going after, you're going to improbably small to midsize cities. Is looks like your sweet spot. Is that right?

[A]

Well, it's a, it's a communication problem that we're addressing. So this came about just being a resident. Like I've never worked for a city, my partners have never worked for cities, but we are residents and we, we felt the pain of either finding information on a city website or getting information, proactive information from cities, either just day to day updates or like emergency updates. And we all kind of have these stories of like, oh, this is really frustrating or this emergency happened. I didn't know about it because I didn't get the notification or whatever. And so we, that's the problem we're trying to solve. And as we got in, as we got into it, we realized it's kind of like it's a two part problem, It's a channel problem and a, and a channel fragmentation problem. And what I Mean by that is you have a website, you have social media, you have email, you have. And within social media, you have six different platforms, and within each platform you've got 10 different pages. And it's just like, it's a. It's kind of a mess. It's kind of chaos. And. And these cities are. They have this philosophy of like, meeting people where they are, which means we're going to try to post in as many different places as possible. And the problem with that is all the information isn't in one place. It's all over the place. And so if I get my information on Facebook, let's say that's like where I see city updates. Well, that you're only seeing a very small part of the picture here. And so if you want more information about XYZ or you have a specific question, it's kind of like, well, where do I go? And then the website is maybe the closest thing that cities have to a single source of truth. But not everything that's on Facebook is on the website and vice versa. And so it's just this kind of like, mess of like, where the heck do I even go to find the information? So that's what we tried to solve is like taking everything, consolidating it, standardizing the process of civic communications so that it's not only easier for cities to manage, because these small cities, a lot of times they don't even have a dedicated communications person. It's like the city managers doing stuff and the city recorder and the clerk and the secretary. And so simpler for cities and then simpler for residents so that they know, like, I have one place, I know I can go for everything. I don't have to worry about, is this the right place? Is this the right channel?

[B]

So when you guys kicked this off, did you. You kicked it off three years ago?

[A]

So we started development. Yeah, three years ago. Right. Like two months before the ChatGPT moment,

[B]

I was gonna say. Right, right. Right around when chat GPT just kind of blossomed. Right. So you had no idea in. In your mind about AI stuff? How has that. I mean, because, man, that's huge AI. How did that play a role in where you're headed with the development of the product?

[A]

Huge, huge dare. I mean, just like everyone else in the tech space, you kind of have to retool everything in a way. And so we had been a couple months down the path, and we were thinking, like, just simplifying posts and updates and push notifications and events and things like that. And then when ChatGPT came out. It's like, oh, now this allows us to create a centralized content database so that it's not just the posts and the events, but it's any city question. Right. Because if you can have all the official information in one place, then you can use AI as a chat layer to then just answer questions directly. So rather than the experience being I go to a city website, I click through 14 layers of tabs and, and 6 different PDF documents to try to find my answer. I can just ask AI. I could say AI, like, give me the building permit form or whatever it might be. And it's like, here it is, here's the link. No search required. Right. So that was the big aha moment. It's like, okay, this unifies everything. It unifies the data, the information for us.

[B]

So you guys pivoted into more of a content management solution.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

With a, A distribution, a unique distribution channel, which I think is pretty clever because most of the other people, they're just throwing chatbots on the front of.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, a bunch of stuff. Instead you guys went full board the other way and you said, hey, we need a content management system first to give to the city and use the chat as a mechanism to interact with, with the constituents.

[A]

That's right, yeah. So you see a lot of cities, and a lot of cities are currently just slapping an AI chatbot on top of their existing website, which, you know, it's better than traditional search for sure. The challenge with.

[B]

I don't think. Yeah, I mean, it could hallucinate, it could give you a bunch of garbage that's wrong. I've, I've already seen that in some of these sites, for sure.

[A]

Yeah. It's kind of the garbage in, garbage out philosophy. Right. Like if the underlying information data you have is disorganized, there's duplicates, it's inaccurate. I mean, AI can only do so much as good as. And as smart as it is. And so, yeah, it's kind of like figuring out an easier way to keep the data clean, but then also, like making it easier for cities to, to manage the information. So let me give you one scenario that's really common with cities. Let's say like chickens, like, how many chickens can I have? Like, that's a common, you know, city type question that residents have.

[B]

Yeah, no, we have that problem in my neighborhood right here. Some lady down the street thinks she can have like 24 chickens. I don't think that's a good idea.

[A]

Right, right. So, so what cities do, because residents have this question and it's in the code. The code is like, I mean, that's like, that's kind of the bible for the city. Right? And answers a lot of these questions. The problem is the code is not consumable. And so what cities do is they put it on a web page on their website and they create a chicken or animal calculator on their website. And then they have another page over here. It's like, hey, fy, this is some information about chickens. And it links over here. And then they put a post about it on Facebook. So it ends up in six different places. This thing about chickens. And so when that, when that thing about chickens has to change, what do they do? They have to go, remember, where in the heck have we put this information? Where is it on our website? And so maybe they're keeping spreadsheets of every single page and like, what information? It's a mess. It's really difficult to keep track of. And then you've got all these pages that you're having to manage and create and find cute pictures of chickens and whatever it might be. And so we're like, okay, let's. If we're using AI and we can approach this from more of a knowledge graph standpoint, let's just ingest the information, let AI do the management part of it. Right? It sort of becomes an agentic content manager where you're just feeding it information and new information and you say, hey, there's some new information about chickens. Here it is. Now it's updating the underlying infrastructure of that knowledge graph. And now it can just answer the questions, you know, in real time with the most updated information.

[B]

So that's really interesting because you've decreased the actual amount of data that's required as well. Yeah, right. Because now I'm only. Now I only care about the policy. Right. I don't care about the, the chicken calculator or, or, you know, the pretty pictures of chicken. The policy is. Is the law, right? That's the only thing that needs to go in. Everything else is table stakes because the AI is going to generate something that answers the question better for the constituent, for the.

[A]

Exactly. And it still always references the official information, right? Because, I mean, AI is a summary. A summary of what? Well, in this case, it's a summary of the city's official information. And so we try to make it clear that AI, I mean, as you know, it's still not 100% perfect and it's going to make mistakes from time to time, but it always will reference the official information. And so AI continues to get better at answering questions accurately and not hallucinating. But when in doubt, it will always reference that code in most cases, like in this question, because that's the official source of truth. And the other cool thing is when you have just the raw information, the unsexy sort of like, you know, unpublished raw information, AI is becoming more and more a great publisher. Right. Where it's taking information and presenting it in consumable ways. And so now you're not having to pay a full time person to be a content creator and publisher and visualizer of information.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Creating the graphs and the charts more and more with the multimodal approach to these models, like we can do that, we can present the information in consumable ways.

[B]

Well, I was just thinking when you were saying that not just in different ways, like voice or images or things, also languages, for sure. Think of a city where there's a huge influx of immigrants. Like here in the Sacramento area where I live, when, when Biden shut, shut down Afghanistan, the war in Afghanistan, we had a huge influx of Afghani immigrants move into the area. And there was a big problem with translation of things into their language. And there's actually multiple languages. It turns out in Afghanistan amongst these immigrants, that was a huge problem because there was a hard way of interacting with them and getting the services that they need with the generative AI that's taken care of, you know, automatically. That's pretty cool.

[A]

Exactly. Well, we've showed cities that it kind of blows their mind. We were doing a demo the other day and of course, you know, we asked a question in Spanish and. Or we just, we got a response in English and said, okay, now give it to me in Spanish. And they're like, okay, what about Mandarin? It's like, sure, you know, Mandarin. It gives you the Mandarin characters. And then what, Somebody's like, can you ask it to give it the response but put it in poetry form? It's like, sure. You know, it's like that, that comes from the LLMs, right? Like we didn't code that. That's just like inherent. These models work, but their minds were absolutely blown. It's like, you know, this flexibility of, you know, the user becomes now that like you can, you can customize the way that the information is delivered. So I mean, that's so powerful when you think about it, because everybody learns differently. You know, like somebody might say I'm a visual learner. So it's great. Yeah, make me a chart. Make, make me an infographic of this information or whatever.

[B]

Let's talk a little bit about the updating of the content because that's a big deal. I'm, I'm thinking beyond just cities. I know you guys are targeted for cities, but I recently I was talking to an agency, I can't mention their name because I get in trouble when I do. But they have a lot of updates to their policies, especially every time that anytime that Congress sneezes, they get new policies or anytime you get a new president, there's new policies that come in and the biggest problem they have is these new policies have to be reconciled with the old policies and, and the new directives get sent out and there's whole teams that, that's all they do is I got this new content coming in, this new policy, what policies does it replace and then what new directives come out of it like, or what things am I allowed to do now that I wasn't allowed to do before and how do I ask it those sorts of things. Your solution here I think can handle that, right? You can handle these updates to policies and things like that?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's not, it's not too dissimilar from what cities deal with because they're always having policy related changes with updated ordinances and rules and things that passed. And so. Yeah, and there's constantly this reconciliation process that has to happen with their current code, but also the state code or county code or these different layers of regulation and rules. It all has to agree. And so again, this is where agentic AI that is intelligence based, knowledge based is so helpful because you know, you can essentially train a really great civic specific agent that knows how to handle civic information. It's like new ordinance, I put that new ordinance in and it knows exactly where to do it and how to adjust things and where to adjust things. I mean, arguably better than a human does or at a minimum a lot faster because it kind of just does it and it has a, a holistic picture of everything.

[B]

Right. So. So that's a key, that's a key aspect to what you guys have is. That's why I like your. When I heard about your solution, I wanted to dig in a little bit more because you're focusing on the content management part.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The other part with the constituent stuff that's kind of built in. But like you said at the beginning, if I don't have good data and the data isn't temporarily important. Right. Then it doesn't, it doesn't provide real value to, to the users, like can I, can I hitch my horse up to, you know, a certain thing probably doesn't apply very, very often anymore, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Where new things are happening all the time and things like that. How, how has it been received by cities so far? Are they, do they see the vision of this? Do they?

[A]

Yes, I, I think that once we explain it, once we go through everything. So this, this is usually how the sort of, the process goes, the mental process for cities. It's sort of like, okay, what is this? It's a little bit like I gotta wrap my head around this because it's, it's a different way. I. Less and less I'm saying it's a paradigm shift because I don't think it's that big of a paradigm shift. I think it's more of just like cities are thinking, well, can we do this? Like, do we have permission to do this? You know, like, for example, one of the things that, that we tell cities is like you, you should really consider getting off of social media. You should really consider, you know, stop doing all of the things that you're doing and standardize it into a single, this single channel of communication. And the reason is like cities do that all the time with different services. You know, whether it's garbage collection or different utilities. Right. They, they have to standardize it in the name of efficiency and just the solution that's best for the most people. And so I think that's like the biggest hurdle for people to get over. But in terms of like the logic of why we're doing it and making it easier, like it clicks for cities. And so yeah, I think cities more and more are just going to be like. I look at as, as a, I look at it as a, an evolution of the website, I guess maybe more specifically information heavy websites and content management system. So if you have that kind of website, that kind of content, which cities do, like this is a perfect solution because like the only reason that we've created these websites in the way that we have with all the tabs and layers and pa is to try to make the information easier to find and more consumable. And now AI has changed that paradigm and so that's what we're trying to help cities wrap their head around. And frankly, the cost of these civic website and content management solutions is quite a bit more than we feel like it needs to be and we feel like we can provide a simpler solution.

[B]

Yeah, you're dealing with derivative work too, right? These websites are just someone writing something about the policy, right.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Where in this case, you can get rid of all that content. That content provides just another view into the real content, which is policies or whatever the regulations or CCNRs. Like in my neighborhood, wouldn't it be great if I could just ask what color can I really paint my house? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that. That's pretty cool. Now, my next question I have, because I think the city might have this one. You've shown me that this is great for pooling information where I'm a constituent, I go on to a site and ask questions. Great. What about. And you mentioned what about being notified of emergencies and things like that? They have all these SMS messaging and I, I know the cities like to push out to social media to kind of drive people into their websites or drive people into like their rec centers and their summer programs and things like that. Aren't you kind of, you know, skirting around that? You're. I mean, you're getting rid of maybe some, some channels of revenue that they have by. By posting on these social media sites?

[A]

Yeah. So the thing with social media sites that most people don't realize is the organic reach of social media platforms, like take Facebook for example. It's probably the primary one most cities use. The organic reach is 2,6%. So what that means if you post something on your page. Yeah, let's say you have a thousand followers. You post something on your page, 26 people of your thousand followers will see that post on average. These are platform averages and that's like platform wide. And so government agency pages are actually lower than that because they're, they're inherently not as engaging.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So like, if you, if that, if that's true, if those numbers are accurate. That's awful. That's awful. And in our opinion, cities shouldn't even be. Be wasting resources in trying to post with that low of reach. And so honestly, what some cities do, they will literally pay for meta ads on their posts to actually reach residents, which again, isn't in. It is. Is insane to us. Like, don't do that. Like don't pay Facebook to reach your audience.

[B]

But how do I reach out? What? Because I, I do need to somehow reach out too, not just be there. So what. What strategies do you guys have for reaching out? Or is that outside the scope of, of what you guys are doing?

[A]

No. So there's a couple things. When you take away the options, people are funneled into one option. This isn't necessarily an easy answer, but this is really, frankly the answer. It's Kind of like garbage collection. Let's look at garbage collection. So if my day is Friday, the garbage is picked up and I just refuse. I hate that day. Like, I work. I. Whatever.

[B]

You put your garbage out on Monday.

[A]

Yeah. And I'm like, you know what? I refuse to take my garbage out on Friday. Guess what's going to happen? My garbage isn't going to get picked up. And if I really want my garbage picked up, I'm going to take it out on Friday. Like, that's just the bottom line, no matter how much I don't like it. And so our philosophy is, you say, residents, we're standardizing. We're going to give you an amazing platform. It's easy to use. It's. It's, it's a mobile app, it's a web app. You can access it from anywhere. As long as you have a connection, you can access this from anywhere. And we're going to put all of our official information on there. We're going to update you regularly. You're going to get emergency notices on here. Everything's going to be streamed.

[B]

Okay, so you do, you do have a push notification where I can say.

[A]

We do.

[B]

Okay, so this is kind of cool, right? Because I can say, hey, I'm interested in any new development in the city. Notify me of any new development in the city.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. Customize your notifications. Only get what you want.

[B]

Now. That's slick.

[A]

Yeah. And if you hate mobile apps for whatever reason you don't like pushing, you can sign up for a summary weekly summary email or a monthly summary email that's automated through the platform. And so it's like we've given cities the ability to reach residents in a really smart, great user experience kind of way. And basically it's like, look, residents, if you want the information, here it is. So it's more of a meeting in the middle approach than as a city. We're going to try to reach you wherever you are, wherever your preferences are. That's a losing battle. You're, as a city, you're never going to be able to reach everybody that way because everybody's going to have their preference. Everybody's going to say, I want it this way and I want it this way. And I'm on true social and I'm on X and I'm here. It's like, no, we can't reasonably do

[B]

that as a city.

[A]

So what we're giving them is a place that is a really slick place to put everything for residents to access. And so then you Ask the question of, like, well, you know, how do residents still have to go in and opt in, basically? And it's like, yeah, if you want information, just like my garbage can, I gotta order the garbage can, right? I gotta opt in. If I want that service, that communication service, I have to opt in. Once that happens, you're golden. And so it will take some time to get people to sign up and opt in and do those things. But it's not five or six options, it's one. And so our thinking is that it's actually gonna be a lot EAS easier to reach a significant number of residents more so than they are now because it's just one option.

[B]

I really, I really like that, that one option thing. And you're right. I actually think it will actually improve constituents being involved in their community more. We, we have an app around here that's a click. A click and fix it app, right? So if one of our neighbors has a camper out front in front of their house for, you know, weeks on end, we can just take a photo, send it, and it, it takes care of itself. We don't even know. I called the Gladys app because it. Gladys was that nosy neighbor on a Bewitched and she was always looking, you know, so my wife thinks it's hilarious because I always say, hey, pull out the Gladys app. These people got a boat parked in the middle of the street, you know, for the last week. So I think people do want to be involved in their communities and they do want to interact. So I think you guys are on the right track here. I think it's pretty clever and a clever use of AI and instead of, hey, just a front end app, you know, just a chat bot on what you already have. No. So pretty slick, Casey.

[A]

You know the next phase of this, Darren, there's so many exciting things you can do with this because if, if you have all the centralized information of the city, then you can use AI to help them become even better communicators. Because anybody who communicates regularly on a daily basis, you kind of have this block. What am I going to communicate today? What am I going to post? What am I going to share? What's worthwhile? What should residents know about, let's say a meeting happened last night. We pull in the transcript from the recording. We got all the context and everything. Now the next morning, the city communicator, when they log into Penny, like, we can offer them like, hey, here. Here are five things you should consider sharing with your residents based on last night's meeting, you know, so because you see a lot of cities posting about, like, the secretary's birthday and, you know, the, the, the dog, the new dog at the fire station. Like, like, great, that's great. But also, like, you're probably not going to really engage your residents that way, but if you give them an update on the development that's going in down the street and you're asking now for feedback on what, which grocery store that you think that should go in there, like, okay, that's gonna, that's probably gonna be interesting to a lot of people. So just how it'll help them become better communicators.

[B]

No, I like, I like this approach a lot. So, Casey, if someone wants to learn more about Penny and all that, where do they go? Where, where they go to find out more.

[A]

Penny app. So P E N Y Penny is. It comes from the, the Pennypress newspapers of the early 1800s. Play on that. One of the first forms of mass communication. So we dropped an N. So it's just one n. Penny. Pennyapp.com is our website. You can, you can check out, you know, more information there and, and reach out if you don't want to see a demo or get more information about it.

[B]

That's, that's awesome, Casey. You know, I can't wait to see how the company goes. So we'll have to have you come back on the show to see, you know, if it's morphed a little bit or if you're expanding. I always like talking to startups because there's so much passion and excitement, and I think you guys have something really cool here, so congratulations.

[A]

Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Darren. Appreciate that.

[B]

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