#233: Is "Modernization" a Cop-Out? With City of Boston, Clark County & Dell Technologies

Episode Summary

Boston's CIO thinks "modernization" is what you say when you've stopped investing. Clark County thinks AI should handle your entire move to a new city. Dell thinks you can't do any of it without clean data. Three takes. One conversation about what government services actually look like when they work.

Featuring

Santi Garces is Chief Information Officer at the City of Boston - leading a team that spans user researchers, designers, economists, and policy analysts, and currently building open-source MCP infrastructure to connect AI tools with city services at scale.

Bob Leek is Chief Information Officer at Clark County, Nevada - overseeing technology for the 11th largest county in the country, home to Las Vegas, with a strategy centered on helping large diverse communities thrive through people, process, and technology solutions such as AI governance, and drone-assisted emergency response.

Carrie Smith is Chief Technology and Innovation Strategist at Dell Technologies - covering the East and tracking modernization trends across state and local government nationwide, with a focus on helping cities start with the right problem instead of the right product.

Timestamps

(2:00) Boston's AI-powered website search - 400% improvement in positive feedback, built in-house

(7:00) Clark County's AI framework - AI as a "how," not a "what," built around four constituent personas

(12:00) Dell's field view - why clean data has to come before any AI solution(17:00) Santi's beef with "modernization" - why small, continuous investment beats the big bang approach

(20:00) Philadelphia's illegal dumping problem - how a vendor conversation became a drones-as-first-responders pitch

(25:00) Clark County drones - 30 to 60 second emergency response combined with ShotSpotter

(31:00) Boston's MCP server - building open source infrastructure so AI tools can talk to city services reliably

(35:00) The pace problem - Bob on why the universe shifting every 17 days is the CIO's real challenge

(39:00) Leadership and resilience - Carrie on stage three breast cancer, Bob on internal promotions, Santi on growing up in Colombia

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