CITY HALL
Meet Penny: Pensacola’s New AI Call-Taker Launches Monday
City’s 311 line will soft-launch an AI assistant built by a New York startup called Polimorphic, backed with $18.6 million from General Catalyst.
Pensacola’s 311 call center is getting an AI assistant named Penny starting Monday, July 6, City Administrator David Stafford announced at the city’s weekly press conference on July 1.
- Penny will begin a 30-day soft launch answering overflow calls during business hours whenever the city’s constituent services team is tied up, Stafford said. The AI is designed to handle routine requests — a tree limb that needs trimming, a pothole that needs filling — and everything in between.
“We appreciate the feedback that she’ll get,” Stafford told reporters, describing the rollout as a learning period for the system before it’s fully incorporated into the city’s 311 operation.
Who Makes Penny
Penny is built by Polimorphic, a New York-based company that sells an AI customer-service platform built specifically for local government. The company’s pitch: voice agents, chatbots and workflow tools that answer resident questions, route calls and route service requests across departments like public works, planning, finance and recreation.
Polimorphic says its platform is meant to give “practical ways to apply AI to real service problems,” bridging existing city systems rather than replacing them.
The company has a growing footprint among small and mid-size cities and counties. Its client list includes:
- Newport, R.I., where officials credit the platform with expanding service hours to nights and weekends and adding multilingual support
- Tooele County, Utah, where staff say response times have been cut in half
- Suisun City, Calif.; Littleton, Colo.; Passaic County, N.J.; and Polk County, N.C., where the tool was used to help coordinate disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene
Polimorphic was named to the inaugural AI 50 list by the Center for Public Sector AI and closed an $18.6 million funding round led by General Catalyst, according to the company’s site.
By the numbers:
- July 6 — Penny’s soft launch begins
- 30 days — length of the trial period
- Overflow calls only, during business hours, is the initial scope