The civic heart of Silicon Valley deployed Denser so staff and residents can ask plain-language questions about procurement, the municipal code, and engineering standards — and get answers cited straight to the source document.
San José's procurement and public works knowledge lives across the City Charter, the full Municipal Code, and hundreds of pages of contracts and pre-qualification documents. Finding a single answer — the bonding rule for a contract, a clause in the code, a required engineering standard — meant digging through PDFs and pages with keyword-only search.
The team needed a way for staff (and eventually residents) to ask a question in plain language and get a precise, trustworthy answer — without losing the ability to verify it against the official source. They evaluated a generic ChatGPT workflow first, but on the same set of uploaded documents it frequently returned no usable answer.
The Procurement Division's chatbot was trained on six core document sets — a mix of crawled web pages and uploaded PDFs — so every answer is grounded in official city records.
Foundational governing document
Full code, searchable by question
Contract terms and references
Smaller-scope agreements
Eligibility and requirements
Professional services agreements
Setup required no code. The team pasted in source URLs, uploaded the documents that aren't publicly crawlable, and the chatbot was answering questions in days. After more than a month of hands-on evaluation across divisions, the City moved to an annual Business plan.
Because the chatbot is configured entirely from the dashboard, the same approach now extends to other departments — each builds a focused bot on its own documents without engineering support.
Research that used to take staff around 50 minutes per inquiry now takes a few — a direct productivity gain that frees the team to handle higher-value work instead of document hunts.
In a side-by-side evaluation against a generic ChatGPT setup using the same documents, Denser returned a valid, correct answer where the alternative often returned none — with no ads and no login prompts standing between staff and the information they needed.
Every answer links back to the exact source — for PDFs, Denser highlights the passage on the page so reviewers can confirm it in one click. Below is a representative example of a cited answer.
Per the City's engineering standard details, the minimum cover (conduit depth) depends on the conduit type and location — the referenced detail specifies the required depth below finished grade for each case.
Illustrative example based on the City's deployment; wording and UI may differ.
Denser cut our research time from about 50 minutes to just a few — a huge boost to our team's productivity.
Turn your code, permits, and contracts into a cited, 24/7 chatbot. See how Denser works for the public sector.
