Local government · How it works & what it touches

An AI front desk for city hall — scoped to what residents actually ask.

Columa is an AI receptionist, website chat, and resident help desk for cities, towns, counties, and special districts. It answers the routine questions around the clock, routes everything else to the right department with a written record, and hands anything sensitive straight to a person.

Informational overview for government evaluation · Olive Group, LLC · columa.ai/government

How it works

From the first call to a logged request.

01.

Answers from your own information

Olive is trained only on material you provide — hours, fees, forms, service days, department routing. You review every answer before launch. When something isn't covered, she connects the resident to staff instead of guessing.

02.

Routes to the right desk

A water-bill question, a permit status check, a pothole report — each request is sorted and sent to the correct department with the details already collected, by rules you set.

03.

Everything on the record

Calls and chats become logged, searchable requests with transcripts — a clean paper trail your team owns. Anything sensitive or urgent goes to a person immediately.

What Olive handles

The routine front-desk questions — and only those.

Utility billing & payment questions
Trash, recycling & bulk pickup
Permits & license status
Pothole / streetlight / code reports
Meeting times, agendas & notices
Parks, facilities & program registration
Business licenses & fees
Office hours & closures

Information boundaries

What Columa touches — and what it deliberately doesn't.

Information Columa touches

Resident contact details a caller chooses to give — name, phone, email.
The nature of a routine request — the everyday questions above.
Appointment details for bookings a resident initiates.
Your published reference material — hours, fees, forms — loaded so Olive can answer.
Call & chat transcripts, logged as the request record.

What Columa does not touch

No criminal justice information (CJI). Columa is deliberately deployed outside CJIS scope — no police, court, or criminal-records intake.
Police & court-records calls are warm-transferred to your staff, with no transcript or recording stored for those calls.
Not a system of record for case files, health records, or sensitive PII beyond routine front-desk contact.
No access to your internal systems unless you explicitly connect a feature.
Contract language available: "not for use with CJI."

Where your data lives

US-hosted reception core — with two disclosed exceptions.

Each function processes only the data it needs, in the region shown. Features are opt-in — a capability you don't enable shares nothing, so a deployment can be scoped to exactly what you approve.

Function	Data processed	Region
AI & voice processing (chat, call reasoning & speech)	Prompts, call audio & transcripts, caller number	United States
Phone numbers & call routing	Caller/called numbers, call metadata & records	United States
Platform hosting	Your service data, at rest & in transit	United States
CDN, DNS & security	Traffic metadata (IP, request headers)	Global edge
CRM sync (optional)	Contact & lead records you sync	United States
Appointment booking (optional)	Booking details a resident initiates	United States
Document storage (optional)	Documents you choose to store	United States
Billing to your agency	Billing contact, tokenized payment method	United States
Transactional email (alerts & confirmations)	Recipient email & message content	EU
Invoicing (optional)	Business name, email, invoice line items	Canada / US

Straight answer on residency: everything that handles a resident's call or chat — the AI, voice, telephony, and hosting — runs in the United States. Two supporting functions are not US-exclusive today: email delivery (EU) and an optional invoicing service (Canada), both tied to features that can be scoped or disabled for a government deployment. A full, named list of the specific providers behind each function is available on request.

Security & public records

Built to be trusted with resident data.

Encrypted in transit — TLS 1.2+ on every connection; HSTS enforced.

MFA on administrative access to the platform.

Payments via Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1); card numbers never stored.

Least-privilege access, server-verified per account.

Cloudflare edge — DDoS mitigation & bot filtering.

Ongoing security reviews, including adversarial testing, with a published responsible-disclosure channel.

Public records: every call and chat becomes a logged, searchable request with a transcript — a clean, exportable paper trail. Your agency remains the custodian of its records. Security details: columa.ai/security · security@columa.ai.

On CJIS, plainly.

Columa is not a CJIS-certified platform, and today it is intentionally deployed outside CJI scope — routine resident services only, with police and court-records matters transferred to staff and no transcript kept. That keeps agencies clear of CJIS obligations for these workflows. Handling actual criminal justice information would require a different, government-cloud architecture — a path we're glad to discuss if your needs grow there.

Let's talk

See whether Columa fits your city.

Prefer to talk now? Call 866‑537‑4777
or book a 30-minute walkthrough →

This overview is informational and describes current architecture and configuration options. It is not a compliance attestation, warranty, or contract. Details are confirmed per deployment. Columa is a technology product of Olive Group, LLC. Security details: columa.ai/security.