AWS Summit DC 2026 | Angy Peterson, Granicus & Alec Chalmers, AWS

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More from AWS Summit DC 2026

Angy Peterson

Senior Vice President of Experience Services

Granicus

Alec Chalmers

Director of EdTech and GovTech

AWS

play_circle_outline AWS Summit 2026 in Washington, D.C.: Granicus Expands Civic Engagement Platform Serving 7,000 Governments Worldwide

play_circle_outline Context-aware, validated, governed content and knowledge bases to reduce hallucinations.

play_circle_outline Granicus and AWS: Deploying Public-Sector AI with Bedrock, AgentCore, and Strong Data Guardrails

play_circle_outline Data readiness, content management practices, and cross-functional collaboration prerequisites for AI.

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Angy Peterson, Granicus & Alec Chalmers, AWS

Angy Peterson

Senior Vice President of Experience Services Granicus

Alec Chalmers

Director of EdTech and GovTech AWS

At the Amazon Web Services Summit DC 2026, theCUBE Research presents a conversation on public sector artificial intelligence, citizen engagement and partnership-led digital transformation. Gemma Allen of theCUBE moderates the session with Angy Peterson of Granicus, senior vice president of experience services, and Alec Chalmers of Amazon Web Services, hereafter AWS, director of edtech and govtech. Peterson and Chalmers discuss AI-driven government services and the role of cloud-native agents, context-aware AI, content governance, accessibility and multilingua... Read more

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What does Granicus do — what products and services does it provide to government organizations? add

What sets this AI solution apart from other chatbots on the market, and which AWS products (e.g., Bedrock) are used to build it? add

What AWS products/services are built into this solution (which is built on Bedrock)? add

What fundamentals or prerequisites—particularly around data and content management and cross‑functional collaboration—do organizations (especially in the public sector) need to optimize technology and be ready for AI adoption at scale, and what do well‑prepared groups look like? add

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Angy Peterson, Granicus & Alec Chalmers, AWS

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live here in Washington, D.C. for the AWS Summit 2026, bring you all the live action. So much happening right now in this conference center. The paradigm shift around AWS is just truly exceptional. And join me now for a conversation on what that means for public sector organizations and governments where AI is truly becoming the front door into these organizations is Angy Peterson from Granicus and Alec Chalmers from AWS GovTech and EdTech. Welcome guys.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yes, that's exactly right. Thank you very much for having us.

Gemma Allen

>> So let's start with Granicus, because it's an interesting company, some interesting stats here. 7,000 governments served, 350 million subscribers, so you guys are doing something right.

Angy Peterson

>> We are. We are.

Gemma Allen

>> Partner of AWS. Break it down for me, Angy. What is it exactly you do?

Angy Peterson

>> We work where government at the intersection where government serves the public. So any of those touchpoints, imagine email, web, digital service delivery, forms, meetings. We have all of those different touchpoints across federal, state and local, in the UK and ANZ. We're truly a global company now too, but we have been growing this full sort of civic participation engagement platform for years now.

Gemma Allen

>> I am one of those people who can never decide if I love or hate AI, right? Every day I change my mind about this. But when I think about the advantages of AI, democratization of data, accessibility, bringing knowledge to the masses, allowing people to interact with knowledge in ways they never have before is certainly an advantage. AWS clearly has a great steer on that. When we think about the world of public sector and government, it's never been the sexiest space in tech, right? It's always been that.

Alec Chalmers

>> What? Am I in the right place?

Gemma Allen

>> It's always been a space that's steady, has a particular rhythm. How are you thinking about things now, Alec? Talk to me about what's happening in your org and why partnerships like this matter so much.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah, this is a great partnership for us. So I think of Granicus as one of those companies that just truly makes governments across the country better. I mean, governments operate better and provide better information to their constituents when working with companies like Granicus. And my point of view, Granicus's real advantage is their deep domain expertise and how to engage with citizens in the way which they want to be engaged, most importantly. So I think a lot of people have this negative image of interacting with their governments. People have ideas of the DMV or a lot of paperwork like we were talking about earlier and then you have a company like Granicus because they can get you the right information when you want it, how you want it. So I think that's the beauty of this partnership in my mind.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, if you could tell me, Angy, that you could save me from queuing up the New York City DMV, I would be exceptionally grateful about maybe bring one of those use cases to life for me. Talk me through a customer example, specifically somebody maybe you weren't working with two years ago that you are now.

Angy Peterson

>> Sure. So we're doing this with the customers all over the place. What Alec was just describing in terms of like really helping to sort of get the right message at the right time, the right information, but limiting the burden on citizens too. We've seen that. We've launched with Wyandotte County in Kansas. They were seeing as many as, gosh, 70,000 different calls into their 311 center, another 70,000 into their treasury department for tax questions. That's a huge volume of intake for anyone centered to manage. But through the deployment of our GXA solution, government experience agent and being able to show up in a way where we're helping the agency to sort of understand the right source of truth, build a knowledge base, have trusted documents in place to really train the agent, but then also use our reg model to like really have that content available and audited and validated and ready to go. Gosh, they've seen so many savings overall, but I think it's like 600 employee or staff hours per year. It's another ... Oh, what was it? It's something like the reduction. It's like a 30% reduction in call center wait time too. Those are meaningful results. It's not quite fixing the New York DMV problem for you, but we're ready, New York DMV. You let us know.

Alec Chalmers

>> What I love about that example in Wyandotte, Kansas when I was preparing for this conversation, there's 41 different languages being administered too in Wyandot, Kansas. I would have never have thought that. I mean maybe now with so many of the World Cup teams being hosted in and around Kansas City and maybe it's grown even more above 41, but with this solution, I mean, now they are able to provide that kind of assistance to citizens no matter what language they speak. And I think that's really tremendous value. I think about New York City, there's a few languages being spoken there.

Angy Peterson

>> Oh my gosh.

Alec Chalmers

>> Most of them clean languages too. Yeah, but I think there are a lot of room for companies like Granicus to help a lot of different parts of the government.

Angy Peterson

>> I'm a human-centered designer at heart and the core of that comes down to accessibility and making things really meaningful for each individual and it's truly not achievable. You can't get to that number of languages at that quick of a turn without having this kind of powerful technology behind it.

Gemma Allen

>> Let's talk about the technology for a second. So one thing we all know about going to any in-person appointment is oftentimes if the question is complex, they have to wait for a supervisor. There's somebody in every one of those offices that has like a pinnacle of knowledge, right? That's been there for years. This person can never take a holiday. AI can change that, right? It has those recursive capabilities. When we think about the tech that you're building, especially you're building what's called the Granicus Experience Agent, how plug and play is this? How does context and other elements come into true success for delivery of something like this?

Angy Peterson

>> I think it's actually fundamentally what says sets apart from other AI sort of chatbots and solutions on the market. It is not just an off-the-shelf running information across the full web. It is really context-aware and it's something we're really proud of and how we show up and make sure that our government customers can feel like the content is trusted, it's validated. It's something that we show up with a services team to help audit the content, to help build a source of truth along with the model that's being trained to really make sure that before it's deployed, it's been tested and that the content is really something that has been validated and governed across an agency.

Gemma Allen

>> And what's the stock for this Alec? It's built on Bedrock, I assume.

Angy Peterson

>> Yes. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I know there, is it AgentCore? What else is built into these types of solutions? Like what AWS products are in place here?

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah. I mean, Bedrock is a key part of that, because it provides those guardrails which allow counties to ensure that none of their citizen data is being used to train models to make sure there's no hallucinations. It also gives companies like Granicus a lot of flexibility to choose different models for different types of questions, right? And maybe a more complex question would be answered by a more higher end large language model. And a more mundane example might be handled by their RAG model. I just think it's tremendous for us to be able to help a customer like Granicus. But the thing is, and like to your question that you started with was there's always that person that has all the knowledge in one of these agencies. Those are very key people. You don't want them tied up in very mundane bureaucratic processes. I mean, they have gained this level of expertise. You want them working on the most complex problems that they have and I think this solution built by Granicus allows them to do that.

Angy Peterson

>> It's actually a real challenge too. There's a sort of wave of people who may be retiring from government in the next 10 to 15 years and many of them have a tremendous amount of knowledge still individually in their own minds and getting to a place where we can get it out, help them sort of document it, help it turn into something that can be used to scale. Yes, it gives that one person more ability to work on the more complex problems, but it also helps government really be ready for the future.

Gemma Allen

>> And maybe talk me through what the human reaction has been across some of these engagements you've worked on, Angy, right? Because we know that in government and public sector, folks are enrolled for a long time. There's a system in place. What do you see in here? I'm sure people are also probably inundated with requests from the same thing for a long time, just like you've described, Alec, but there's an inertia too, right?

Angy Peterson

>> There is.

Gemma Allen

>> How do those two weigh out?

Angy Peterson

>> It's like a fear, natural sort of risk aversion, right? We also have deployed the solution in Jackson County, Missouri and it was for sort of tax records and personal property tax requests and they were getting as many as 135,000 a day and there was concern about the volume. But like once we went in and went through this process of validating the content, auditing it, testing it, getting the full sort of buy-in across the various leadership and stakeholders at the county, man, we were hearing from leaders who at first were like, "I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure yet." Who now are like really seeing, "Oh, my team has capacity, this is working. I'm actually seeing the public get the answers they need." It's an inevitable snowball effect. You just have to build the trust one by one.

Gemma Allen

>> And when we think about optimizing the technology, what sorts of fundamentals or prereqs do you see? We talk a lot about data in every organization, but particularly in public sector and government, because we know we're sitting on an insane amount of data that's been largely unstructured, sometimes ungoverned for a long, long time. How do you kind of see these fundamentals come into play? Are there certain groups or folks you've worked with that you feel were set up from success early on? And what does that look like?

Angy Peterson

>> Gosh, I mean, some of this I think comes down to ... Man, there's a few different sayings, garbage in, garbage out, how well someone's actually been managing their content and their data over time is an indicator of whether they're actually fully ready, right? Some customers where we've been working with them for years to help really have a strong content management practice and process in place where they're governing the content in and of itself along the way, they're perhaps a little further along ready to go. And they also have seen then that they're working across perhaps different departments within an agency that sort of cross-functional collaboration is often another ... I'm not going to say blocker, but maybe hill to climb on the path to being fully ready for AI adoption at scale. Those customers that have made that true sort of journey along the digital transformation path, the ones that are further along are just further along and more ready for.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah, I would totally agree with that.

Gemma Allen

>> Alec, I'm interested in this paradigm shift and this narrative shift that's happened very quickly, especially in public sector and government, right? We know that cloud, I mean AWS did a phenomenal job in the cloud space, but it wasn't an easy transition for many, right?

Alec Chalmers

>> No.

Gemma Allen

>> There was a lot of folks said, "We'll never be fully public cloud." And some of them never really were, right? But the expectation that now you're going to be agentic in like a flick of a switch, it seems like a little bit difficult sometimes to reconcile.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk to me about that, like how you guys think about that and how that translates the conversations you have with Granicus customers and other partnerships.

Alec Chalmers

>> Well, I mean, I think what you're seeing is you see customers that have, like Angy was saying, have put in the hard work and labor to get their data structured in a way that they can take advantage of all of these AI improvements in their business. We're seeing that happen. But like you were in New York City last week where we announced AgentCore and I think what you're going to see is more with this agentic flow that more and more customers, through agents, are going to be able to get their data structures right and be able to take more and more advantage of AI. And so what I think we're just beginning this flywheel of seeing more and more agencies being able to use that data that has been locked up in caverns, and silos, and dungeons, and all those horrible places, and now we're freeing it and using it, right? I mean, if you think again about the Granicus solution with over three billion transactions that they're able to use that context around, we're going to see more and more valuable solutions brought. And again, I really do look at it as like ... It's almost a consumerization of government and we've all been waiting for it and wanting it and you're going to see more and more of those examples like with Wyandotte and Jackson County, Missouri. When we see more and more examples, they're going to tell two friends, they're going to tell two friends, we're going to see this expansion because more and more counties are going to want to offer these services. And this is a very unique area where we are in D.C., but around us we have counties that compete viciously for corporate headquarters to land in them, right? So more and more, you're going to see counties starting to compete and provide these different level of services. And I, Alec Chalmers, truly believes that you'll see governments actually compete with type of AI solutions they offer to their citizens and to corporate entities as well.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, it's certainly a very important space right now from the perspective of society and where we're headed. So I certainly hope you're right and I certainly hope you continue to grow your business and grow your impact. Last question, what's ahead? We're going to all celebrate 4th of July this weekend and then we're going to be back to pressed in the office on Monday. What does that look like for this relationship?

Angy Peterson

>> Our big thing, right? We're launching our workflow agents, as you were just hinting at. So that's really moving from AI that sort of just answers questions to AI that acts and really helps to integrate across different tech stacks, different solutions. I mean, sometimes when I think about it in a very human way, like right now I could come home and ask my Nest to change the house temperature, ask Spotify to play a song, ask Alexa to do a task for me or place an order, but in the future we'll be in this place where I can just come home and ask my home to set a relaxing environment for me and all of those systems together all sync-

Gemma Allen

>> Does it remove your children?

Angy Peterson

>> ... and know what the heck I mean, right?

Gemma Allen

>> In my case, remove my children from the apartment.

Angy Peterson

>> Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's nap time, right?

Gemma Allen

>> Or even some days my husband?

Angy Peterson

>> But getting those systems to work together and getting them to really flow through.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah, pretty sure.

Angy Peterson

>> And maybe for your New York DMV example, right? Really being able to understand when you go to any one spot within New York, whether it is the DMV, whether it's health and human services, that you're able to access the information very easily through one front door, one system and they're all talking to each other. It's coming.

Gemma Allen

>> I love it.

Angy Peterson

>> Yeah.

Alec Chalmers

>> And for us, so after the US wins on Wednesday night, celebrate our 250th birthday as a country.

Angy Peterson

>> Yeah, no big deal.

Alec Chalmers

>> Coming Monday, Granicus and AWS. AWS is going to keep on investing in Granicus and our customers and obsessing over solutions that help them do their jobs better.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, folks, God bless America. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah, thank you Gemma.

Gemma Allen

>> Thanks so much.

Alec Chalmers

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen here with theCUBE. We are at the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C. We are bringing you all the live actions and conversations on the ground. Got some great content coming off. We're digging into sovereign cloud and what that means for this next paradigm of AWS. Don't go anywhere.