After years of complaints from residents frustrated by slow responses to 311 requests, Mayor-President Sid Edwards’ office hopes some new tech will make things move faster.
On Wednesday, the Metro Council approved a contract to start a pilot program that will use artificial intelligence to help tackle complaints of potholes, blight, broken streetlights and other non-emergency situations identified by East Baton Rouge residents.
The program, given the name “Grace,” will start by answering after-hours calls, and Edwards team says it will eventually lighten the load on call center workers, shorten the time it takes to address issues and make the city-parish’s 311 system more cost-efficient.
After coming into office, Edwards and his team quickly saw that many complaints were being duplicated in the system, and residents often weren’t having their 311 calls returned.
“The idea is that Grace will be so good that when you call it, it's going answer the first ring every time, and when Grace calls you back … the product is good enough to where they’ll be happy,” said Mason Batts, executive director of the Mayor’s Office. “We're trying to improve the overall customer experience.”
Following the first phase of solely after-hours service, Grace will then start taking calls during the day. If residents would rather speak to a person, the program will transfer them to one, Batts said.
In the last phase of the pilot, the program will allow 311 call center workers shift their focus from constantly answering calls to making sure complaints are quickly assigned and addressed, Batts said.
He also said the program is designed to improve over time.
“Every day, Grace gets better,” Batts said. “She learns based on all the call data she will get, and she'll get better with the more interactions with people she has … it will become to where you have no idea you’re talking to an AI.”
Council member Carolyn Coleman saw a brief demo on Grace earlier this week, and said she is excited to see it fully deployed.
Council member Carolyn Coleman speaks during the metro council meeting at City Hall on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Javier Gallegos
“I think Grace is gonna grace us with some more efficiency,” Coleman said. “311 has been one of the most cumbersome things within the city-parish since I’ve been on council.”
The Grace pilot will cost $140,000 to run starting June 1 through July 2027. Care Plus Ventures, which created the system, will be paid those funds to implement it.
Batts says the data collected will not only help the city-parish to address issues more quickly, but also eventually anticipate them before they happen.
“The AI on the back end will be able to tell us over the past six months we've had ‘x’ number of pothole calls on this street … and the road is deteriorating faster,” he said. “We’ll be able to see ahead of time that we need to get that road in line of an overlay before we actually see any major cracking or anything like that.”
The Mayor’s Office hopes to deploy Grace in other city-parish departments in the future too, Batts said, especially in the finance department.
“We really hope at some point, Grace will be citywide,” Batts said. “We're going to save the people a lot of money with this.”