Yeti Creates Spin Off Company, Civic Chatbots, & Signs San Francisco as First Client

“We’re excited to create a dedicated company built around this platform to focus on improving government communication,” said Yeti President and Co-Founder Tony Scherba. “We’ve been playing with chatbot technology in government for a while and can see the clear need in a broad range of government departments for a better form of engagement.”

Civic Chatbots came about after Yeti’s involvement in the Startup in Residence (STIR) program in San Francisco in the fall of 2017.

Yeti worked with the San Francisco Office of Contract Administration and the Committee on Information Technology to develop a chatbot application, PAIGE. PAIGE, Procurement Answers and Information Guided Experience, is a chatbot solving procurement related issues for the City and County of San Francisco.

Robert Henning of San Francisco’s Office of Contract Administration summed up procurement in an article in GovTech, “We get inundated with questions from city employees about procurement, and a lot of them are very repetitive. Every time someone ask me about RFPs, a small part of my soul dies.”

After the STIR program, the City of San Francisco was pleased with the solution PAIGE provides for city government procurement pains and has signed on as a new Yeti client.

Chatbots promise the ability to reduce employee frustration in departments call centers. Chatbots can easily guide users through standardized step by step process for the solutions they are looking for. Additionally, the knowledge a chatbot provides is always consistent and accessible.

Speaking on the vision for the new company, Mr. Scherba says, “Governments are rules-based organizations that are complicated to navigate. Machine learning chatbots that can answer questions and guide people through these rules to make governments accessible to citizens and public servants. As it is now there is a lot of confusion, frustration and mixed guidance when dealing with governments. Chatbots and governments are the perfect match of a problem and technology solution.”

To learn more about Civic Chatbots, visit the website.

About Yeti LLC

Founded in 2010 by Tony Scherba and Rudy Mutter, Yeti is a collaborative product design and development studio that works with companies to bring their software product ideas to life. Clients include Google, PlayStation, AKQA, Qualcomm, MIT, and Westfield Shopping Centres. For more information, please visit www.yeti.co.