Austin Wins Digital Cities Award for AI Governance, Modernization Efforts

Texas' capital city earned a seventh-place ranking in this year’s Center for Digital Government* Digital Cities Survey, marking a year of targeted progress in digital equity, AI governance and modernized service delivery.

Among the city’s most visible advancements was the launch of its All Services Hub, a redesigned digital entry point for city services. Developed through resident feedback and usability testing, the platform organizes services more intuitively and supports multilingual access, reflecting Austin’s equity goals.

The effort also included integrating six standalone department websites into the main city platform, reducing total website pages by more than 40 percent and consolidating more than 3,800 redirects into fewer than 900.

Austin also took steps to modernize internal operations, including the implementation of Workday Human Capital Management, which streamlined hiring, onboarding and performance reviews. On the cybersecurity front, the city migrated to a new, in-house security information and event management platform, cutting licensing costs by more than half and enabling cross-department threat analytics.

In artificial intelligence, Austin piloted IBM’s AI governance platform and tested its own citywide virtual assistant under the “One City” initiative. The pilots emphasized transparency, risk evaluation and prompt accountability, aligning with Austin’s broader AI governance framework. The city also tested generative AI internally for content summarization and staff productivity across departments.

Austin's open data portal saw a 66 percent increase in visits, boosted by improvements in data quality and reliability. Meanwhile, a new translation platform increased the accuracy of multilingual content to 87 percent, reinforcing the city’s focus on accessible and inclusive government services.

*The Center for Digital Government and Industry Insider — Texas are part of the e.Republic family.