Codex is helping Travis Hoppe, Ann Lewis, and Shannon Arvizu build a new way for governments to learn from one another.
Their company, GroundVue, starts with a problem local officials know well: cities, counties, and states are often working through the same hard challenges, from homelessness to infrastructure to public health, without an easy way to see what other governments have already tried.
The answers often exist. They are just buried inside public meetings.
GroundVue turns those meetings into information officials can search and compare. A mayor looking for ways to prevent homelessness could see how other cities are helping families stay in their homes before eviction. A county confronting an unfamiliar challenge could learn what similar places debated, decided, and discovered.
“We’re now creating a way to make government searchable in real time,” said Shannon, a sociologist and policy researcher.
GroundVue is solving a difficult data problem. Across the US, roughly 90,000 government bodies make decisions that touch people’s lives. About half of their public meeting videos are available in obvious places, like YouTube. The rest are spread across local websites and other platforms, with no single format or easy way to find them.
GroundVue uses Codex to help find those harder-to-reach public sources and build the systems needed to keep collecting them. OpenAI models help transcribe the meetings and identify the problems, tradeoffs, and possible solutions officials are discussing.
For Ann, who previously led Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration, the change in speed is dramatic: “All those steps that previously took a few days or a few weeks take us literally minutes now.”
Travis joined the company after serving as the chief AI officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he used OpenAI’s Deep Research in a pilot program to help the agency process large volumes of research and data.
GroundVue reflects a related idea: AI can help public institutions make sense of information that would otherwise be too scattered and time-consuming to use.
The analytical work has changed, too. “Before AI, this would have taken an army of technologists and an army of social scientists,” Shannon said.
GroundVue is still in its infancy. The company plans to launch first in Virginia, California, and Minnesota over the next few months, expand nationally later this year, and add full historical data to the platform within two years.
The point is not to replace public servants or local judgment. It is to help officials learn from the decisions and debates already taking place in communities across the country.
As Travis puts it, “Instead of using generative AI to generate things, we can use it to listen to the things that people are actually saying.”
