By BOB SHRALUKA
WZBD.com
The City of Decatur could be going the AI route in the near future.
A presentation by Building/Zoning Superintendent Curt Witte at Tuesday’s council meeting brought up an AI (Artificial Intelligence) software proposal from Ordinal Software, based in northwest Arkansas.
It’s an AI-powered research assistant which allows a department to quickly find answers to questions. “You can pull up a property in the city and quickly find out what you want to know about it,” rather than going through pages of documents, Witte said.
The proposal was first made to Mayor Dan Rickord, who said he gets things of this nature frequently, “but this one seemed interesting.
“It throws all our city records, GIS, and state codes together,” the mayor noted.
A 15-20 minute video explanation of the software from an Ordinal rep was aired at the meeting.
The information in the research assistant would only be available “in house,” not outside city departments.
Council and the mayor seemed quite interested due to, in part, to one reason: a cost-cutting enticement.
The company normally charges a $10,000 startup fee and an annual charge of $15,000. But since Ordinal has no clients in Indiana and would like to get a start in the state, it would drop the startup fee and reduce the first-year charge to $10,000, according to Witte.
And there would be no long-term contract, the mayor said.
No decision was made, but Witte was given several questions to be forwarded to Ordinal.
The company says on its website: “Ordinal is an AI-powered research assistant designed specifically for municipal governments. It helps staff find accurate answers from approved city documents, GIS data, and other resources in seconds. Using advanced AI methods like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Ordinal ensures that every answer is grounded in your city’s official information.”
