Elevating Empathy Over Bureaucracy With AI-Powered Interviews: A FormFest 2025 Profile

A familiar and distinctly bureaucratic irony: Families in crisis can access government services meant to ease their trauma, but only through an intake process that often forces them to relive it. In California’s Riverside County, a potential solution has emerged: Artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” can use a single interview to apply for multiple benefits, allowing families to find support without recounting their struggles over and over again.

The project, led by a four-person team funded by a Google.org accelerator program, is an extension of the county’s integrated services delivery initiative. The latter program uses technology to connect eligible residents with benefits across other county departments. The family resource model builds on that system using “agentic AI”—an autonomous technology that can be trained to operate with less human input. This results in a streamlined process that frees caseworkers to focus on clients rather than paperwork, elevating empathy over bureaucracy. 

The project is still in development, with a Google-sponsored demo in December and a pilot tentatively scheduled to launch in Riverside early next year. However, the team is already looking beyond that.

“The north star is that we can build something flexible, modular, and can [adapt] to the needs of each county and each government agency,” said Jillian Hammer, a senior designer and researcher with Nava. “I don’t want to over-promise, but the goal of the pilot is to see how it works at Riverside and if we want to scale it.”

Charna Widby: Early Interventions

Although Charna Widby, First 5 Riverside County’s assistant director, didn’t enter public service to experiment with emerging technology, this particular emerging technology aligned perfectly with her reason for being there: helping families get the help they need. At the beginning of her career, that meant working with young children as a behavioral therapist.

“I’m an early childhood person,” she said. “I was very drawn to early intervention, with an emphasis on developmental delays. My background is entirely with kids under the age of three.”

Widby quickly noticed the disparities in both care and development between low-income families and those with more money. The gaps did not improve when funding increased, indicating that disparities began before birth, she said. Although some people might find that discouraging, Widby saw it as an opportunity.

“The way that we treat families with eligibility thresholds was incredibly horrible,” she said. “So, I decided to get into government, because I thought, ‘Well, we can fix that.’”

Today, Widby spends most of her time doing just that at First 5 Riverside County, a department focused entirely on early childhood services and investment. Outside of work, she can be found with her rescue dog or watching The Real Housewives series. However, she admits that she’s most likely to be seen at work.

“I work a lot,” she said. “There’s never a shortage of things to do.”

Jillian Hammer: The Narrative Arc of Design

Jillian Hammer is a senior designer and researcher, and her work crosses the invisible line between engineers and consumers. Although she was not initially enthusiastic about the prospect of AI, the Riverside project changed her outlook.

“I came into the work sort of already a skeptic, or critic, of the AI industry in general—just knowing so much about how it can harm people, either intentionally or unintentionally,” she said. “This project is an opportunity for us to carve out a space where it’s used for good.”

For Hammer, that means leveraging the technology to help, rather than supplant, the human components of government service.

“Something that I’m doing in the next phase is leaning into the preciousness of the in-person conversation,” she said. “I don’t want to just introduce tech—I want to be more embedded in the natural flow of conversation. I’m thinking about it in terms of ambient AI that can listen and learn from that, but I’m also just making sure the user experience is designed to be minimally disruptive. We want the conversation to take the most attention, and to allow for human interaction.”

Narration through technology has always been a focus for Hammer, who started her career designing interactive museum exhibits that used touchscreens and audio components to provide context for visitors. The work felt like storytelling, she said. Her current research feels like that, too.

“To me, it’s an extension of that,” she said. “I’m always making sure those stories are reflected in the product and in the work.”

Kaylyn Van Norstrand: Building Blocks

If you ask nicely, software engineer Kaylyn Van Norstrand might show you the LEGOs. There’s a 1,872-piece DeLorean, complete with wire antenna, hoverboard, and a tiny LEGO-ized duo of “Back to the Future’s” Doc Brown and Marty McFly. There’s a 2,193-piece set with three locations from “The Nightmare Before Christmas:” Jack Skellington’s house, Spiral Hill, and, appropriately, Halloweentown’s town hall. And then there’s the pièce de résistance: a 2,316-piece replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.”

This may seem removed from Van Norstrand’s work as a software engineer at Nava, but it’s actually sort of the same thing.

“I like creating things out of nothing,” Van Norstrand said. “I always have ideas about how to build things, or what things should look like, or how to make things better.”

That drive—and the imagination that powers it—is crucial to her role in Riverside, where she focuses on development and prototyping. This involves gathering input from caseworkers on how the system should work and then building it to suit their needs. This type of immediate feedback was new for Van Norstrand, who had previously worked on more traditionally siloed initiatives. 

It was a welcome change, she said. “This is my first experience where it’s just a constant back and forth,” she said. “We talk so much more, whereas previously I’d just have received the user experience research secondhand. It’s been collaborative, and that’s been great.”

Stephen Rockwell: The Straightest Path

Stephen Rockwell has a lot of titles. A small sampling: Chief innovation officer for Imagine LA, founder of HumanServices.ai (HSAI), AI consultant. The one he won’t answer to? Technologist.

“I’m not really a tech person,” he said. “I’m really just concerned about making a difference in the world, and technology is the fastest and most direct path to get there.”

Still, the path between emerging technology and government is frequently winding, Rockwell said. This is often because the technology hasn’t evolved to meet the specific needs of the public sector. However, Riverside’s project, funded by a grant specifically geared toward leveraging generative or agentic AI to solve societal problems, could be an exception.

“This is the start of the next evolution of how we might think about automation,” he said. “The holy grail for me in benefits access is: Can we get an agentic AI to pull from existing data sources and submit an application, so that we’ve taken all of the overhead out of the system? We’re testing some different approaches to that.”

The results could have implications beyond the county’s borders, he said.

“This is one of the few projects like this that I’m aware of across the country, with early leadership and learning that could inform future efforts,” he said. “I think you’ll see a lot more agentic AI deployment over the next year or two.”