Can the public sector actually innovate faster than private enterprises? In this episode of the AI First Podcast, we sit down with Suma Nallapati, Chief AI and Information Officer for the City and County of Denver, to discuss how Denver is using customer obsession and cutting-edge AI to transform resident services.

Suma shares how Denver is leveraging "Sunny"—a secure, encapsulated GPT-powered assistant integrated with Salesforce and MuleSoft—to handle 311 resident inquiries 24/7 in 72 different languages. Discover how they slashed transaction costs from $4.75 with human agents down to just $35 cents per transaction, and how they are streamlining complex licensing and permitting workflows using guided AI processes.

We also dive deep into the critical pillars of Denver's AI strategy: delivering real value, driving responsible culture and AI literacy, and designing seamless resident experiences. Learn how Denver established a robust Information Governance Committee, created innovative vendor risk assessments, and why Suma advises other CIOs to "stop doing AI for the sake of AI."

Whether you are a public sector leader, a commercial enterprise CIO, or an AI enthusiast, this conversation offers a practical, fearless, and ethical blueprint for driving real-world AI adoption.

What happens when one of America's most cutting-edge research labs puts AI to work protecting the very discoveries it's designed to accelerate?

In this episode of the AI First Podcast, Jon Herstein, Chief Customer Officer at Box, sits down with Jesse Henning, Library and Information Manager at Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's premier research institutions. Jesse digs into how Argonne is using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, from streamlining document review and publication workflows to helping researchers surface insights across thousands of technical reports.

Learn how they're balancing the immense potential of AI with rigorous governance, protecting sensitive research from being scooped, and navigating national security and export control requirements. Jesse also discusses the evolving role of research librarians as AI stewards, the importance of keeping humans in the loop, and how a deeply ingrained safety culture at Argonne is shaping responsible AI adoption across the lab.

Key moments:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:30) The real tension between accelerating discovery with AI and controlling what's exposed
(02:57) What Argonne National Laboratory actually does
(04:15) How Argonne makes research publicly available through the DOE
(05:05) The role of a research library in a national lab
(05:12) Using Box Hub RAG to analyze 300 technical reports instantly
(06:35) Handling hallucinations and why "right enough" isn't good enough in science
(07:51) How AI is freeing librarians to focus on harder, unsearchable questions
(10:51) The travel policy chatbot: a real-world, non-hype AI win
(14:46) AI-assisted document review for national security and export control
(16:47) Amplifying signal-to-noise so expert reviewers focus on actual risk
(17:31) How Argonne uses AI for content governance without losing human context
(20:53) What separates AI experiments from true production deployments
(23:14) Top-down vs. bottom-up AI experimentation and why both are happening
(26:04) The "key turning in the lock" moment that makes AI believers out of skeptics
(26:46) Which AI pilots deserve to survive and why curation is the deciding factor
(29:46) Why librarians were always the original AI stewards