When Sarah Okonjo reported a large pothole outside her house on Elm Grove in September, she received a reply within ninety seconds. It was polite, detailed and thanked her for helping to keep the city's roads safe.

It was also, she later discovered, written by a computer. And three weeks later, after a second report and a second equally polite reply, the pothole was still there.

"I don't mind talking to a machine if it actually gets the hole fixed," she said. "But it told me the issue had been resolved. I can see it from my window. It has not been resolved."

Ms Okonjo is one of a number of residents who have contacted The Wire about Harbourton City Council's new AI assistant, which has been handling online reports about potholes, streetlights, fly-tipping and missed bin collections since mid-September.

How the system works

Residents reporting a problem through the council's website or app now interact with an AI assistant rather than filling in a static form. The assistant asks follow-up questions, requests photographs and location details, and then categorises the report and routes it to the relevant team.

According to the council, it can also answer common questions — such as when bins will next be collected — and close reports that are duplicates of issues already logged or that fall outside the council's responsibility, such as problems on private land.

The council says the system was introduced to deal with a large backlog of reports and to free up staff to handle more complex cases. It is being run as a twelve-month pilot.

The council's case

Figures shared with The Wire by the council show that the average time to acknowledge a report has fallen from more than two working days to under two minutes since the pilot began. The council says the number of reports correctly routed to the right team on the first attempt has also improved.

"Residents were waiting far too long just to hear that we'd received their report," said the council's director of digital services. "Our staff were spending hours every day sorting and forwarding messages instead of actually fixing problems. The assistant takes care of that, so people can focus on the work that matters."

The council stressed that the assistant does not decide whether repairs are carried out. That decision is still made by highways and environmental services staff, who inspect reported problems and prioritise them according to safety and available resources.

"I don't mind talking to a machine if it actually gets the hole fixed." — Sarah Okonjo, Elm Grove resident

Where things go wrong

The problem, residents and councillors say, lies in how reports are marked as closed.

When the assistant identifies a report as a duplicate of an existing case, it closes the new report and tells the resident that the issue is "being handled." In some cases, residents have interpreted this as meaning the problem has been fixed, when in fact the original report may still be waiting for inspection or repair.

In other cases, residents say reports have been closed incorrectly — for example, as being on private land when they were on a public road. The council acknowledged that "a small number" of reports had been misclassified and said it was reviewing the wording of the assistant's messages.

"The technology might be efficient, but efficiency isn't the same as accountability," said Councillor Priya Mehta, who sits on the council's scrutiny committee. "If a resident reports a dangerous pothole and is told it's been dealt with, and then someone is injured, who is responsible? The system? The supplier? The council?"

Questions about transparency

Opposition councillors have also asked for more information about how the system makes decisions, what data it is trained on and how much the contract with the supplier is worth.

The council said the system uses a commercially available AI model configured with its own policies and service information, and that residents' reports are processed under its existing data protection arrangements. It has not published the value of the contract, citing commercial confidentiality, though it said the pilot was funded from an existing digital transformation budget.

The scrutiny committee has asked senior officers to attend its next meeting to answer questions about the pilot.

What experts say

Specialists in public sector technology say councils across the country are under pressure to use AI to cope with rising demand and tight budgets — and that the risks are often less about the technology itself than about how it is introduced.

"The most common problem with these systems isn't that the AI is wrong," said one researcher who studies digital public services. "It's that it's very confident, very polite and very fast, which makes it easy for residents to assume something has happened when it hasn't. Clear wording and an easy route to a human are essential."

What happens next

The council says it will update the assistant's messages this month to make it clearer when a report has been merged with an existing case rather than resolved, and to add a direct option to speak to a member of staff. It has also promised to publish monthly performance data for the remainder of the pilot.

As for Elm Grove: two days after The Wire contacted the council about Ms Okonjo's report, a highways crew arrived and filled the pothole.

"So it does work," she said. "You just have to call a newspaper first."

Have you used the council's AI assistant? Tell us about your experience at news@wire.example.com.