The public sector faces many unique and acute challenges. Government agencies must respond to crises at speed, navigate shifts in technology on limited budgets, and address staffing shortages, economic disruption and supply chain issues, just to name a few. With consistently strained resources, public sector organizations need tools that help them act quickly without needing additional head count. That’s where natural language tools come in. By leveraging modern data tools, including those with natural language capabilities, governments can work to fulfill their missions of best serving their citizens. They can build trust within their communities while also rapidly delivering high-quality, reliable digital services.
Convincing public sector organizations that they need to move to the cloud is largely behind us, but some organizations are still relying on outdated, legacy tools. Across the industry, organizations are overwhelmed by the needs of their citizens, so the prospect of deploying and managing a modern data warehouse or big data infrastructure is daunting.
Without modern digital tools, data is likely scattered across multiple systems or unavailable within an organization. This can lead to inconsistent workflows and interfere with real-time decision-making. At times, data sharing in government is ad hoc, requiring riskier physical data movement between outdated, less secure tools. Inaccurate data impedes organizations from effectively responding to the needs of its citizens. This causes limitations with reporting and threatens compliance standards.
Natural language tools such as Snowflake Intelligence let employees in public sector organizations get quick answers to complex questions. This ready-to-use enterprise, agentic AI tool provides comprehensive business data, third-party data and market context — all in natural language. It helps public sector teams turn data and institutional knowledge into confident decisions that drive real impact. Data queries are secure, and insights gained are fast.
This innovation helps organizations securely process and analyze information from their databases, allowing for better decision-making. This means that organizations can shift their resources away from manual, tedious work and have them focus on higher-level, innovative initiatives that drive greater impact.
King township, north of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, is a small but growing municipality focused on delivering high-quality services to its 29,800 residents. Operating with lean resources, the organization has become an award-winning leader in AI adoption. As the organization modernizes its operations, data and AI have become central to improving transparency, accountability and service performance.
Prior to adopting Snowflake, the township of King had siloed and fragmented data sets across dozens of systems. This prevented a 360-degree view of operations and required a lot of manual reporting. The lack of automation for data analysis overtaxed the township’s small data team. Third-party vendors also often had restricted data access, which made it difficult to own or move information. With limited capacity, the organization needed a manageable data solution without having to hire a team of data scientists.
The township of King is now using Snowflake Intelligence agents to handle ad hoc, creative queries that fall outside standard analytics.
By centralizing its data in Snowflake, the township began aggregating operational data sets — starting with data on waste and recycling systems, with analytics collected through Green Life Environmental and its Recycle Coach app — into a single governed platform. The township built dashboards to unify key metrics and deployed Snowflake Intelligence to support ad hoc analysis. As a result, customer service associates and frontline operational staff can now help field resident inquiries by asking complex questions and iterating on insights beyond standard dashboard metrics. This foundation has been valuable and is guiding plans to expand similar capabilities across additional departments.
Within the waste and recycling division, Snowflake Intelligence has changed how staff answer operational questions. Instead of needing to route complex requests through the data team, staff can now explore issues independently and iterate in real time. “We’re talking about taking a process that could take weeks, and now you’re getting information in 10 seconds,” says Marco Cheng-Perri, Manager of Digital Transformation, Data and Corporate Performance for the township of King. “It’s opened the door to data for everyone.”
This shift has allowed staff to better assess whether initiatives are driving the intended results for residents. For example, the team can explore whether increased usage of their recycling app is associated with changes in recycling behavior. Currently, they’re seeing growth in app uptake and improvements in behavior. With Snowflake Intelligence, the team can dig deeper — asking why improvements are or are not occurring and identifying potential actions to drive better results.
Citizens expect government services to be prompt and effective. Lack of data standardization and lack of effective reporting causes delays and potentially errors, which ultimately impacts the communities the government agencies serve.
Public sector organizations need modern tools with complex capabilities and easy-to-use functionality for staff members across business functions and seniority levels. Snowflake Intelligence is just that. It applies enterprise semantics and uses AI agents to reason across the information in a governed, transparent way. It is Snowflake’s enterprise intelligence experience built on Snowflake Cortex AI, a tool that provides AI, agent and semantic capabilities.
Snowflake Intelligence helps enable government staff to improve the quality and speed of decisions, so they can remain up to date on the latest regulations and fulfill the timely needs of their citizens. It helps government agencies be proactive and leverage the use of secure data, analytics, AI and modern business intelligence, so government organizations can step into the next phase of innovation and ultimately better serve their communities.
Learn more about how Snowflake Intelligence can empower everyone in your organization to get data-driven answers to complex questions, all in natural language. Watch the on-demand virtual event Snowflake Connect: AI.
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