Westminster City Council: Keeping Westminster beautiful with gen AI
Brings 80% of resident dumped waste complaints online
Reduces time to file a dumped waste report from 5 minutes to 88 seconds
Achieves 86% report accuracy to ensure fast resolution of dumped waste problems
Paves the way for further gen AI use cases across resident and tourist services
Westminster City Council worked with partner Ancoris to use Google Cloud AI technologies for a new approach to managing dumped waste and fly-tipping reports for cleaner streets and happier residents.
Westminster City Council worked with partner Ancoris to use Google Cloud AI technologies for a new approach to managing dumped waste and fly-tipping reports for cleaner streets and happier residents.
Tapping into the power of gen AI
Public sector organizations are increasingly embracing gen AI to address the needs of diverse communities. Based in the heart of London, Westminster City Council is using gen AI to enhance experiences for 250,000 residents, businesses, and the millions of tourists who visit the city annually.
The Council looks to efficiently provide housing, social services, public health planning, city safety, and more. With that in mind, they are reimagining how to deliver all of these services at scale.
“At the end of the day, we want to improve residents’ lives,” says Sarah Williams, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Westminster City Council. “An important part of our efforts includes taking a data-driven, people-centric approach to achieve our goals.”
Westminster City Council recently embarked on a gen AI journey with Google Cloud and partner Ancoris to transform how citizens report problems with dumped waste, potholes, graffiti, and other issues. The system, called Report It, required Westminster City Council to restructure their organizational processes and related technologies.
Report It was a manifesto commitment to simplify interactions between the council and the people it serves. Through extensive user research, the council identified more than 80 ways its residents and visitors could interact. The focus quickly turned to Report It and taking action on user feedback regarding the use of AI.
Residents report 30,000 waste issues each year, and that’s just one of 27 categories within Report It. Accuracy is essential. We need to ensure we can seamlessly manage and deliver services – and resolve issues as fast as possible. Google Cloud and Ancoris offer the right combination to achieve our goals.
Sarah Williams
Chief Customer Experience Officer, Westminster City Council
As a first step, the organization sought to strengthen cross-team collaboration and eliminate data siloes created by legacy processes and systems. The lack of unified teams and processes prevented the organization from benefiting from advanced analytics, including taking advantage of powerful new gen AI capabilities.
Westminster City Council had traditionally relied on single-focus teams to address specific needs of citizens, tourists, and others. In response, the organization refined its structure to create multi-disciplinary teams.
“We’d been on this transformation journey for many years, and we learned a lot as we migrated our legacy systems to the cloud,” says Rebecca Gordon, Digital Lead, Westminster Council. “Technology is moving fast. We were fortunate to already have a foundation in place to benefit from AI as we evolved our Report It services.”
Meeting and exceeding resident expectations
Report It has always been an important resident service, especially given the challenges associated with having millions of people visit world-renowned attractions within the borough such as Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and Trafalgar Square.
Based on a recommendation from the Google Cloud team, Westminster City Council worked with Ancoris to develop a pilot for a revamped Report It application that updated everything from the backend to UX design. Ancoris had also previously worked with the council on an air quality project several years back.
Ancoris used Vertex AI to stand up the gen AI-powered Report It tool, and worked closely with Westminster City Council to ensure design best practices.
Vertex AI acts as the central platform to manage AI/ML model workflows used in the solution, and its Model Registry is used to store, version, and manage the foundational and customer AI models used, as well as to orchestrate training of customer models using datasets stored in Google Cloud Storage. Vertex AI endpoints deploy trained models for real-time predictions.
Vision API is used to extract information from images uploaded by Westminster’s residents and visitors in the reports they submit, while BigQuery acts as the central data warehouse for storing and analyzing the data in the reports made to the council. Model performance metrics, and application logs are also handled in BigQuery, while insights from data analysis and model performance are used to improve the system and make decisions on new feature implementation, chatbot interactions, and integrations with other council services.
The application’s frontend and integration layers with AI chatbot models, image classification, and object recognition, are hosted on Firebase. Google Maps API provides geolocation for items reported and Credential Manager manages API keys and secrets.
Ancoris also made sure this solution could integrate with various third-party systems such as the council’s authentication provider, CRM, GIS, and property and street registry platforms.
In addition, Ancoris upskilled staff across the three multidisciplinary product teams that manage Report It. The training strengthened collaboration between Westminster City Council and Ancoris leading up to the pilot launch.
Vertex AI also proved to be the right solution due to its ease of use.
“The Vertex AI interface easily allows us to see changes and build question trees,” says Gordon.
Ancoris helped Westminster City Council on its journey from prototype to production through an iterative development process that delivered the right application within a matter of months.
Through the successful updating, Report It, today, delivers a streamlined, reliable, and intuitive service so Westminster residents can submit one of their most cited grievances – dumped waste and street cleaning.
Building on success
The updated Report It experience built on Google Cloud with Ancoris has been a hit with residents. It also met the service goals originally outlined by the Council.
After just three months, Report It overtook all other channels residents use to report issues, and the system achieved 86% accuracy in categorizing issues. Previously, the residents needed about five minutes to complete and submit a report. Now, with the new AI-powered experience, people can submit a report in 88 seconds. And, as more residents become familiar with the Report It interface, Westminster City Council expects the average time to drop to seconds.
“We want to get about 80% of transactions online. The good news is that with our redesigned waste experience, we are already there. We didn’t expect to hit that on our first release,” says Williams.
As Report It drives faster reporting and improved operational efficiencies through more accurate reports and routing, it has become a marquee initiative for how the council thinks about engaging with citizens and visitors—a ‘north star’ for positive user experiences.
Westminster City Council still has 70 other service categories that could benefit from gen AI. Ancoris and Google Cloud are currently working with the Council about how Gemini 1.5 might be a helpful addition to Report It.
I’m happy about the difference we can make and the positive feedback we receive. It’s exciting to come to work every day and new tools like Gemini 1.5 will further enable us to enhance the lives of residents.
Sarah Williams
Chief Customer Experience Officer, Westminster City Council
“The sky is the limit with where we can go and what we can deliver next,” says Gordon. “We all work in the public sector because we care about improving people’s everyday lives. With the changes we’ve made, we can see the positive impacts on our community.”
Westminster City Council is the largest local authority in London and oversees resident and tourist services in the West End for iconic landmarks like Buckingham Palace, Oxford Street, and Westminster Abbey.
Industry: Public Sector
Location: United Kingdom
Products: BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Vertex AI, Vision API
About Google Cloud Partner - Ancoris
Ancoris is a Google Cloud Services Provider, headquartered in the UK, on a mission to become the most innovative Google Cloud partner in the ecosystem.
