In March, a new light rail line connecting Seattle to downtown Bellevue opened, adding to development pressure in the fast-growing suburb.
That pressure is acute in the city’s permitting office, where staff members field questions from permit applicants, interpret permitting codes and evaluate pre- and post-submittal requests.
Like many cities, Bellevue is exploring how to use AI to improve public services, said Sabra Schneider, the city’s CIO, in an interview with InformationWeek. Streamlining permitting is a practical place to begin. The project’s ambitious goals: to reduce by 30% the 20,000 staff hours devoted each year to permitting and to cut the number of resubmitted permits by half.
Finding a partner
Bellevue had numerous options to consider for its early AI forays, with startups clamoring to share their products with city governments, Schnieder said. Govstream.ai emerged as a frontrunner based on three factors: it was a local startup, had history in the civic tech space and proposed a partnership that “gave Bellevue confidence it would be a good pilot,” she said.
Several months of negotiating with Govstream.ai before work officially began in April 2025 made it clear that the city’s contract process needed to be updated to work with AI startups.
“We knew with AI we were going to have to think a little bit differently because most of the vendors working in the space didn’t have five years of government experience or, often, the things that you’re looking for in a traditional RFP,” Schneider said.
Adopting an ‘innovation resolution’ to partner with AI startups
Instead, the city adopted the Innovative Design Partnership Policy in July 2025. The resolution aims to help the city partner with local and national startups through more of a design partnership model than a traditional RFP.
Govstream.ai and Bellevue worked together to identify the goals of the permitting pilot project, which is broken into the following phases:
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Phase one: The first phase of the project focuses on an internal guide that answers questions for the city’s permitting staff.
“It acts as a chatbot for staff. It also acts as an email response tool to answer routine questions, so that staff are spending less time looking up routine things or code and more time responding to complex questions,” Schneider said. The goal is to make this tool public-facing as well.
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Phase two: The second phase of the project, currently underway, will provide real-time permit application guidance. “Ideally, that would shorten timelines for new housing and also commercial space, basically allowing customers to submit a cleaner packet on the first shot around instead of going back and forth with staff,” Schneider said.
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Phase three: This phase aims to leverage AI to automate permitting application triage. The goal is to identity issues and push permits forward faster. With AI handling that work on simpler permits, the permit team could focus on more nuanced, complex issues.
Initial outcomes and ongoing work
Progress so far is encouraging; 198 users in development services now have access to the AI tool. “We’re pretty optimistic about achieving that 30%,” Schneider said.
Looking at phases two and three of the project, the city is targeting a 50% reduction in application resubmissions. Resubmissions can slow application approval considerably. Each resubmission can take weeks, and applicants may go through multiple cycles. Govstream.ai and the city have a tentative plan to launch its application assistant in June.
AI adoption for civic CIOs: Lessons learned
Civic CIOs can be swept up in the excitement of AI innovation just like their peers in the private sector, but when they innovate the results must benefit the public. Schneider has kept that in mind as she and her team continue to move forward with AI adoption. Among the useful lessons she has learned:
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Community alignment. Civic CIOs have to consider if AI use cases are aligned with the communities they serve, according to Schneider. With that in mind, Bellevue has actively sought community feedback from stakeholders, including businesses, nonprofits and students through an innovation forum.
From that public engagement, digital equity for citizens emerged as a distinct priority. Stakeholders also raised concerns about jobs and the fairness and accuracy of the information the city gives with the help of AI. This insight is helping Bellevue as it thinks through its AI policies beyond permitting and continues to look for ways to apply the technology to its services.
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Data management. Schneider noted that she and her team have learned a lot about data readiness as they work on this project. “Bellevue had to do a fair amount of data cleanup in order for Govstream to ingest our code and ingest our rules,” she said.
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Human partnership/ domain expertise. Bellevue’s IT team plays an important role in the permitting project, but the Govstream.ai team worked directly with some of the city’s permit techs to understand how to deliver a project that solved actual pain points and could improve over time. “Obviously, the people closest to doing the work know the most about how to do the work better,” Schneider said.
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Traceability and transparency. Bringing permitting staff into the process brought traceability to the forefront of the conversation. They wanted to know how the AI tool provided the answers it did. Early on, Govstream.ai built in traceability functions and feedback loops to enable training of the systems over time.
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Peer networking. AI adoption can be a collaborative process. CIOs at different organizations and in different jurisdictions can learn from one another. The GovAI Coalition could be a place for government CIOs to start. It has templates and tools that policymakers can reference and adapt as they establish AI governance and launch AI projects. “It’s by government and for government. And that’s a great group to help get [you] started,” Schneider said.
