Category: State or Local Government

Benefit programs like unemployment insurance are complicated and time-sensitive with weekly eligibility requirements. As a result, contact centers routinely experience high call volume that increases exponentially during economic downturns. Yet for many constituents, contact centers are the only lifeline to get the answers they need while looking for work. More than ever, agencies can benefit from AI and automation to reduce call volume, improve self-service, and empower staff productivity—not just to maintain service levels during low unemployment, but to scale and rise to the occasion of unexpected surges in demand.

Since its launch in 2023, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance has been joined by more than 650 employers and more than 970 educatio­­­nal institutions, and has engaged more than 53,000 learners with employers across 11 countries. Germany is renowned for its engineering innovation and industry strength in sectors such as automotive, manufacturing, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, and this post highlights the contributions the Tech Alliance is making in the country.

Government procurement professionals are tasked with balancing the need for innovation while adhering to strict regulations. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies, such as generative AI, presents both opportunities and challenges in this delicate equilibrium. This post provides guidance on how procurement can play a pivotal role in enabling the responsible use of AI within the public sector.

As government organizations transition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they often seek to maintain operational continuity by using their existing on-premises firewall solutions. Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) enables seamless integration of these firewall appliances into the AWS architecture, ensuring consistent security policies and minimizing disruptions. This post explores best practices for implementing GWLB to facilitate centralized traffic inspection for both east-west and north-south traffic flows.

On December 2, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference returns to Las Vegas for our 13th year of learning with cloud enthusiasts from around the world. This flagship AWS event unites global visionaries to explore the latest technologies redefining what’s possible for their missions. For our public sector pioneers, tailored sessions and activations will amplify your re:Invent experience, and this post will help you to start charting your personalized agenda today.

Rideshare demand prediction is a well-explored topic in academia and industry, with abundant online resources offering diverse modeling frameworks tailored to different geographic contexts. A challenge with rideshare demand prediction, however, is that the trip data required to calibrate or train models can be exceptionally large. In this post, we explore the challenges of big data analytics and showcase how ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine, a spatial analytics library for the Apache Spark environment, can be used on Amazon EMR to effectively address these problems.

In Modernizing tax systems with AWS, we briefly touched upon infrastructure and application modernization using microservices and serverless architectures. We hear from multiple tax and labor agencies about their desire to move to API-based architectures and adopt new technologies. In this post, we dive deeper into these areas and discuss benefits, approaches, and best practices for building modern tax and unemployment insurance (UI) applications using microservices.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the experience of state and local government constituents. With Amazon Lex, you can design and build sophisticated voice and text conversational interfaces, deploy omnichannel experiences with pre-built integrations to contact center solutions, and pay only for speech and text requests with no upfront costs or minimum fees. This post provides a technical walkthrough for building a generative AI chat-based solution.

Welcome to the frontier of public sector innovation, where artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a buzzword but a tool for transformative change. As citizens’ expectations evolve and the need for rapid, accurate information becomes more pronounced, state and local governments seek smarter ways to keep pace. Enter Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and large language models (LLMs)—the dynamic duo powering the next wave of efficient state and local government services.

The process of transcribing video or audio files has traditionally been manual and time-consuming. Beyond the need for accurate and cost-effective transcriptions, attorneys have determined a need for timestamping capabilities, speaker identification, search and replace capabilities, the highlighting of specific words, editing capabilities, and most importantly, shortened turnaround times.To address the need for quicker and more accurate transcription of audiovisual files, the Contra Costa County (CCC) District Attorney’s (DA) Office reached out to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and partnered with AWS Partner ScaleCapacity to develop a solution that would automate the manual transcription process. Read this post to learn more.