In this Dreamforce segment, Jesse Elizondo, assistant city manager for the City of Kyle (TX), joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to share how a fast-growing municipality is using Salesforce CRM and AI to transform resident services. Elizondo explains how Kyle scaled from a small town to ~70,000 residents and why public sector work (cyclical processes and abundant public information) is a natural fit for AI. He details how the city stood up a full-service 311 in six to eight months, then layered an AI system on top so residents can submit service requests 24/7 – even after call centers close.
The conversation dives into how an internal “brain stem” built from resolutions, ordinances, fees and even council-meeting captions empowers human call takers to resolve complex questions in one call (e.g., Wi-Fi tower rollouts). Elizondo outlines the leadership-driven culture change, security guardrails for sensitive data, measurable efficiency gains – such as cutting “what time is the pool/library open?” calls – and why consolidating siloed software and roles helped the city save more than the total 311 implementation cost. Set against the agentic AI momentum at Dreamforce, this is a candid look at what’s working now in the public sector, and how cities can “punch up” with AI to improve customer experience and accelerate projects.
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Jesse Elizondo, City of Kyle
In this Dreamforce segment, Jesse Elizondo, assistant city manager for the City of Kyle (TX), joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to share how a fast-growing municipality is using Salesforce CRM and AI to transform resident services. Elizondo explains how Kyle scaled from a small town to ~70,000 residents and why public sector work (cyclical processes and abundant public information) is a natural fit for AI. He details how the city stood up a full-service 311 in six to eight months, then layered an AI system on top so residents can submit service requests 24/7 – even after call centers close.
The conversation dives into how an internal “brain stem” built from resolutions, ordinances, fees and even council-meeting captions empowers human call takers to resolve complex questions in one call (e.g., Wi-Fi tower rollouts). Elizondo outlines the leadership-driven culture change, security guardrails for sensitive data, measurable efficiency gains – such as cutting “what time is the pool/library open?” calls – and why consolidating siloed software and roles helped the city save more than the total 311 implementation cost. Set against the agentic AI momentum at Dreamforce, this is a candid look at what’s working now in the public sector, and how cities can “punch up” with AI to improve customer experience and accelerate projects.
In this Dreamforce segment, Jesse Elizondo, assistant city manager for the City of Kyle (TX), joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to share how a fast-growing municipality is using Salesforce CRM and AI to transform resident services. Elizondo explains how Kyle scaled from a small town to ~70,000 residents and why public sector work (cyclical processes and abundant public information) is a natural fit for AI. He details how the city stood up a full-service 311 in six to eight months, then layered an AI system on top so residents can submit service req...Read more
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What event is being covered in the text?add
What is the speaker's perspective on the use of AI in the public sector compared to the private sector, and can they provide some context about the City of Kyle?add
What has been the impact of population growth on the infrastructure and customer experience in the City of Kyle?add
What should we focus on for future initiatives?add
>> Welcome back, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Gemma Allen, my co-host. We are here live in San Francisco for Dreamforce 2025. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got all the leaders coming on theCUBE sharing their perspectives, their opinion on the agentic AI future, Agentforce. And of course, we know the AI infrastructure is building out superfast. That's going to open up a massive tsunami of agents, new kinds of data paradigms and software. And, of course, we've got the customer perspective from sales, was also a practitioner. Jesse Elizondo, Assistant City Manager, City of Kyle in Texas. Jesse, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Yeah, thank you guys for having me. This is fun. This is exciting.>> Coming off the keynote stage you're on, you give it a lot of talks. I guess my first question is, with all the build out on AI, it's almost like the road to super intelligence. No matter when you think it's going to come, it's just moving so fast. Agents are here, there are use cases. People are looking at Agentforce has got traction, but it's enabling a lot. Not so much how much sales are done for Salesforce, it's enabling things to get done. What's your perspective? What are you talking about here at the show?
Jesse Elizondo
>> Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me, and I am happy that you guys pulled me in here and us in here from the public sector. So the way that we're using AI and the way that we're utilizing it, I think is very different than private sector. I personally think that the public sector was built perfectly for AI and for what it does. Everything we do is very cyclical. We have a lot of public information that the public wants and wants to get a hold of. So if you don't mind, I'll give a 30-second version of just the City of Kyle in general. We're 20 minutes south of Austin, Texas, the capital. If it's rush hour, it's about two hours south, but normally it's about 20 minutes south. Kyle, historically, 15 plus years ago was 10,000 or less people. So this is a small city outside of Austin. Over the last 15, 10 years really, they've had just tremendous growth in the central Texas area. So we've gone up to about 70,000 people. Anyone in the public sector knows that when you have that kind of hockey stick growth, it puts stress on your infrastructure. It puts stress on your roads, on your water, on your waste water. But one thing most people don't think about is it puts stress on your software and your customer experience that you're providing for your residents. So we are very lucky in the City of Kyle, I have to say that we have this very innovative leadership group. My mayor, our city council, my city manager. I mean, they have a vision for Kyle to be one of the most innovative, one of the fastest growing and kind of the top tier of everything that we touch, including the customer experience that we have. So just as a base, we had this huge growth for the city. To fix this customer experience problem, we built a foundation of the Salesforce CRM, which is an incredible product. But we knew that as we continue to grow, Kyle is the second-fastest growing city in the nation, as crazy as that sounds. And as we continue to grow, we knew that we not only needed to fix the problem of this hockey stick growth we've had with residents about the customer experience, but also look towards the future, which is like you mentioned, AI and utilizing AI.
Gemma Allen
>> It's so fascinating when you talk about the public sector versus private sector dynamic, right? Because it's often down to ethos as well as spend. You guys have a very impressive agility record here in Kyle. How has that been fostered? What has really driven the innovative thinking?
Jesse Elizondo
>> Really, first and foremost, it's the culture, it's the mindset. It's everything we touch. It's going to be the best. We're going to be the most innovative, including software, but also it's driven by our residents too. They wanted a better customer experience. I will tell you that we built our 311 system in six to eight months, which is incredibly fast for a full service 311, and then immediately launched into utilizing AI. One of the things that we did when we first utilized it was we were getting thousands and thousands of calls during the day. But one of the use cases we've used was during the second, third shift. So after 5:00, we don't get a tremendous amount of calls. It wasn't enough to validate a full-time employee to take those calls. So we have this system, this AI system that sits on top of our CRM, our 311. It knows everything about service requests. It can do all kinds of intake. And so we used to have to tell our citizens, "Hey, this great 311 system that you love and that elevates your experience, it closes at 5:00." And so now, one of the use cases we had was that as an AI, we can now say we're open 24/7, people can log on, they can do service requests. It's been a huge benefit to them.>> Jesse, Dave Vellante and I, on our CUBE podcast every week, we always pretty much talk about the whole cliché or trope around, "Oh, AI is going to take jobs away." I'm glad you brought up the public sector, because cloud changed public sector, AI is changing public sector because the enterprise have budgets, big budgets, so they hire a lot of people. Maybe some jobs go away, but AI allows people to punch up with capabilities. So you got a lot of data, budgets need to be productive with what you got and you got to do more. So I think that is something that really highlights the AI value proposition because now you say, "Okay, what's our resource?" The city, the residents, the data. And then you go, "Okay, if I'm going to do an IT project, I got AI." It's like adding people. So you're getting the benefit, you're highlighting the benefit. Healthcare is another great example where AIs win. So you got these areas that were comparing to enterprise, the big banks, they have unlimited budget. JPMorgan budget is $17 billion a year.
Jesse Elizondo
>> That'd be nice.>> That's their technology budget. But talk about that dynamic and how that changed the execution, because pre-IT is like, "Okay, I got to spin up a project, got to get a budget, hire some developers. Where's the staffing going to come from? Do I hire?" It's like a whole nother level. Explain the mindset of AI brings in.
Jesse Elizondo
>> I love this. You guys know your stuff. Let's talk about the punching up first. I mean, the one thing we saw happen immediately, I always get a question from our call taker standpoint, the human call taker standpoint where they worried that this was going to take their jobs and stuff. What we did was we showed them that not only from the service request standpoint, we started building into the brain stem of our AI agent, our resolutions, our ordinances, everything that runs the city, our charters, our development code, our fees. And we showed the call takers, "Hey, listen, when the call comes through, you have no idea what's on the other end of that call. We get the wildest calls that come through our call center, but with this tool that we say it has the whole past and present of Kyle, maybe one day-">> The brain.
Jesse Elizondo
>> "Maybe one day a future. But right now, the whole past and present of Kyle." Even our council meetings, I'll give you a good example. Our council meetings, all the backup that goes to our council meetings, we have a closed caption. We've loaded all those closed captions into the brain stem. So now, our call takers, not only can our residents get on and utilize this as a huge boon for their customer experience, but our call takers pick up the phone and now they're empowered. You're talking about punching up, they're empowered to immediately, "I now have a tool that knows everything from the past and present of the city."
So we had a call recently where we were doing something with some Wi-Fi towers that we're going to expand Wi-Fi in the city. Someone called and asked our 311 agent, "What's going on with those Wi-Fi towers?" We would never expect a call taker->> To get back to you on that?
Jesse Elizondo
>> Yeah. We would never expect them to watch our council meetings or know that they type it into the internal AI agent. Not only do they get everything that's been through council, what the vote was, how it was discussed, but then it will be rolled out at this time, and this is the estimated date. And so think about it this way, internally, our call taker was empowered to have all of that knowledge at their fingertips, which is tremendous. And externally, the resident called one number and got a full explanation of exactly what they wanted in one phone call. So it's both, right? It's a benefit to both our residents and internally.
Gemma Allen
>> And John mentioned the cloud adoption cycle for public sector, which was a little bit slower I think for the most part than it was for broad private sector. And there was definitely reservations around governance and compliance and all of those challenges that now seem like a million years ago, but they were very real once upon a time. So when you think about the buyer journey for AI, you were here at Dreamforce, obviously, a big Salesforce customer. What has that been like? Is it a little bit more of a risk-taking, let's try and see approach because everything is moving so fast?
Jesse Elizondo
>> So I will say from an innovative standpoint, there needs to be buy-in from leadership. I mean, there's no question. If you have a leadership that's not trying to drive innovation, not trying ... It's going to be very hard to drive that through. It depends on your organization, but from what we've seen, it has to be top-down and get buy-in. The other thing is from a small to mid-size city like we were, if you're not in the public sector, a lot of people don't understand this, but we're a business of businesses. The amount of things that we do across the board, we're building parks and putting on recreation events at the same time that we're policing and putting out fires in the community, literal fires. And at the same time, we're doing water and wastewater lines that are in so many different things. And so from that standpoint, the ability to have all of that data all at your fingertips and to have all of that together. And from a security standpoint, one of the things that I get asked a lot is the security of what we're doing. There's data that comes in. One of the things that we have as a public sector entity, the majority of what we have is public information. We want to get it out to the residents. And so we're able to build->> Yeah, take it.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Yeah, take it.>> Except for ransomware, we don't want that.
Jesse Elizondo
>> No, no, no. But I mean all of that information we're like, "Here, have it and have it at your fingertips." And then the few things like auto form filling out and stuff like that with people's information in it, we were able to build security rails around it. So it's been a tremendous benefit to us.>> How about the efficiency? Because I can imagine the growth. My mind kind of races, "Okay, planning, new subdivisions, power, water." These are things that are big projects, probably take up a lot of time. How is AI helping the infrastructure piece? Because Texas is hot right now for data centers and expansion. A lot of people moving to Austin area.
Jesse Elizondo
>> I think you could talk about licensing, permitting, inspections, all those things that any developer that you talk to is like, "Oh, I got to interact with the city." They plan in long periods of time. The ability to build->> Yeah, punch me in the face. I don't want to go to there.
Jesse Elizondo
>> The ability that these systems have to not only take in. Again, back to that brain stem. Once you have everything in the city working inside this brain, you're able to extrapolate it out into all of these different projects. So the licensing, permitting, inspection piece, now you can have a front-end system that can help your developers go through it quickly and then also evaluate to make sure that they're doing everything on time and within their service level agreements. And then I will tell you this, based on the ... We were talking about the budgeting. When we did our centralized 311, cities like us, we do so many different things, a lot of times it gets very siloed. I need this person, I need that person, and you don't realize you're hiring that, or softwares across the entire city, just because they're trying to get a job done. And so the ability to look at everything from a holistic view, almost from a CTO view in a private sector and say, "Hey, we're overlapping in all these different softwares and we're overlapping in all these different full-time employees for the full launch and build out of our 311 system." We actually estimated that we saved more money than it cost to implement the entire system itself, so it was a tremendous benefit.>> That's huge.
Jesse Elizondo
>> And to sell that to your leadership, to your residents, to roll that out as like, "Hey, this not only is going to enhance your customer experience, it's actually saving the taxpayers' money," is tremendous. It's tremendous.
Gemma Allen
>> And talking about those silos, because I think there's often ... At least in a regularity too that knowledge is power for certain industries, and people have worked in silos for a very long time, I'm sure, especially in government and public sector. So how is AI transforming that? How is it opening up synergies? How is it helping people share and collaborate better? I think you guys are a very integrated Salesforce user. I'm sure you use Slack, et cetera. How is it playing out in the day to day?
Jesse Elizondo
>> My first thought in answering that question is just the amalgamation of data, right? Because with silos of human beings comes silos of data. And we always joke internally that we don't have bad data, we have decentralized data. And so across all of those different divisions and departments, to gather all of that data together and to clean it and organize it is a tremendous effort, especially since our city has been around for over 100 plus years. There's just all kinds of history. So the ability for AI to just take all of that in and sort it into the brain stem and be able to organize it and spit it out has helped tremendously with efficiencies within the city.>> I mean, everyone's IQ points just go up. Their jobs are better. I guess my question for you is being a Salesforce customer, you had great success. Congratulations on all the great work. What is your action item list for them? Because you're a customer, they probably ask you. What should we work on next?
Jesse Elizondo
>> This is a very exciting question, and I have a host of answers to that.>> Here's the laundry list.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Some of them I can't share yet because we want to be the leaders, and I don't want to tip our hand to anybody, but honestly, we're doing some very cool stuff. But because of our leadership and because of the direction we've gone from the very beginning, we were never just solving a problem. We were solving a problem with a view to the future, and I really mean that. It's in our strategic plan for the city. It's in our vision statement for the city. And so when we went with Salesforce CRM and then eventually AI, we knew where we were going with it. And so we're building this data, centralized brain stem, and we knew at some point we're going to add voice into this. And so now, instead of people being able to access all of that online in the way that they can now, they can actually call in and have a conversation with a voice that now has the full history and current goings-on of the City of Kyle and can interact in any way they want to with it. That's just one. That's just one.>> I interview a lot of ... Kyle is a great place. It's close to Austin, so it's got a metro area. So we interview a lot of sports teams and it's always manage the team, manage the fan experience, and manage the sport. So you guys have residents, so you got to run the town to check the residents. They need a good environment to live in, they want to live in a great place, and two property values go up. I mean, you got the surge. I mean, people got to be happy. What's the residents take so far?
Jesse Elizondo
>> We've heard a couple things. We've heard the customer experience has gone up, and we've seen it in our data too as well, that a lot of those knowledge-based calls, "What time is the pool open? What are the library hours?" Those have dropped because people are engaging online. And so we've seen those calls drop and also allows our agents to take a more human critical thinking problems and work those through with our residents rather than being exhausted from taking all those calls all day long. And then the other thing we've heard is because we're utilizing this to develop things all across the city, the general feeling of the city are the parks that we're building, the projects that we're doing, the speed to rolling these things out, we've seen increase tremendously, and that residents love that. They're not sitting waiting for projects that they've heard about for years. They're actually rolling out. The last two years, we've rolled out a tremendous amount of projects that had previously stalled in the past. So it's been a big boon to our residents. And then for our city council, they hear from the residents and then we hear from them, so they've been much happier. And so everyone's been much happier.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk to us a little bit about the employee experience. So I learned at the stage here that Texan employees and Kyle for sure are much better paid than they are in government in Ireland. I might actually try and get a job in the City of Kyle. I may need job, Jesse. Joking, but what has that journey been like for your staff? How are you bringing stuff along on this AI, now agentic AI potential journey?
Jesse Elizondo
>> So our council leadership, probably five plus years ago, has always had this kind of vision and drive. We have a new city manager that came in two and a half years ago, and he has driven, taken that leadership vision, and we built a ... As a city management team, we built a strategic plan around that, and that has driven kind of a new culture throughout the whole city. Now, we have grown, I believe it was six, seven years ago, we were 250 employees, now we're almost 500. We've almost doubled in that short span, which matches the growth. But the employees that are coming in, and if someone rolls off or retires, the new employees that are coming in, they're seeing that culture. It's not all about the salaries, even though we pay well, but they're seeing that culture and that drive and that innovation and this type of stuff that's all around us, and they're very excited about it. We have an IT team. Every time I meet with them, I love them. Every time I meet with them, they're like, "What are we doing next? What's the new project? We're super excited about it." And if I have a problem and say, "Hey, we're having an issue with this integration." They're like, "We're going to figure it out because ..." Not because we're trying to do our job, but because they want to see the end product. And so they're like, "We're going to make sure that we roll this out and get it." So the team has bought into that, and I think that has been the morale of the city, has also gone up tremendously. And so we're building everything around that. Also, paying people what they deserve, which is->> And unifying the data, unifying the people. It makes it better work environment. Jesse, congratulations. Great place to live. Everyone is happy. City runs great.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Right now, it is the place to be. It is a tremendous place to be. And we've had employees come in that just say, "Man, this is just fantastic. We love it. We love the leadership we have there. It's wonderful.">> All the Californians, they're going to Texas. If you're watching, put Kyle on your bingo card, get in early. Get in while you can.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Yeah, if you came to Austin, come down to Kyle and see us.>> Austin's too crowded. No one goes there anymore.
Gemma Allen
>> For sure.>> Thanks, Jesse. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it.
Jesse Elizondo
>> Hey, thank you all so much. This is a blast.>> All right. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE. Of course, the change in the game is what data does. AI makes things better, easier, more efficient. For Gemma Ellen and John Furrier here in theCUBE, thanks for watching.
Gemma Allen