What a custom agent looks like inside a small city, town, utility district or public agency — the ten roles in your language, and what each plugs into in an organization running Tyler, OpenGov or a permitting platform.
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A small municipality delivers a wide range of services with a staff sized for none of them individually. The clerk handles records requests, meeting minutes and licensing. Public works handles work orders and assets. Permitting handles applications and inspections. All of it is subject to open records law, public meeting requirements and retention rules, which means the documentation is not optional and the deadlines are statutory.
The honest version of "does it integrate with my software." These are the systems this industry actually runs on, and what each one means for a build.
Widely deployed across finance, utility billing, permitting, courts and records in local government, usually as several connected products.
Applications, plan review, inspections and licensing, where applicants experience the government most directly.
Water, sewer and refuse billing with meter reads, delinquency processes and statutory notice requirements.
Cartegraph, Cityworks or similar tracking assets, maintenance and citizen-reported issues against a fixed budget.
Agenda packets, minutes and public notice with statutory timing that cannot be missed.
Requests with statutory response deadlines, requiring search across systems, review and redaction.
Phone, email and request portals, where the same questions about bills, trash and permits arrive continuously.
Bids, RFPs and vendor compliance under public purchasing rules.
Each of these is a real build, not a feature of a product you already pay for. Follow one through to see how it works in general.
Nothing you are owed gets dropped.
Whatever arrives, in whatever format, becomes a clean record.
Writes the recurring document from your own past work.
Knows what expires, renews or comes due — and says so first.
Answers from your own records, not from the internet.
The conversation becomes the record, without anyone typing it up.
Assembles the recurring report from systems that do not talk.
Matches two sets of records and queues only the exceptions.
Two systems that do not talk, now talking.
Applies your rules, escalates only what needs judgment.
If that is a job in your business, the next step is half an hour on a call. Bring whatever you know about the volume — how many a month, who owns it now, which systems it touches. That is enough to scope it properly and quote it flat before anything starts.
Everything in this library is built to order rather than bought off a shelf — and whatever I build, I host and maintain. The rest of the library is here.