California hopes to make state workers more efficient with AI assistant

William Melhado, The Sacramento Bee on Dec 31, 2025

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California wants to use ChatGPT to make state employees’ daily work easier and more efficient.

That’s the goal of Poppy, a new “digital assistant” powered by ChatGPT and other publicly available generative artificial intelligence tools, which the California Department of Technology began piloting earlier this year.

State employees can use the AI assistant to dig through California’s dense catalog of policies and more easily find answers to complex state government questions. It’s different from publicly available GenAI tools, like ChatGPT, because it was built by state workers, for state workers, said Jonathan Porat, the state chief technology officer.

“If you ask about a particular policy or a question about the state, (Poppy) answers it from the perspective of you are a state worker asking a question about that policy,” Porat said.

The technology department built Poppy using information from the state that currently lives on department websites. When posing questions about state laws, employees using Poppy receive more specific and in-depth responses compared to those produced by ChatGPT, Porat said.

After the pilot phase ends in June, the technology department will decide if Poppy will be expanded as a statewide application. If the department decides that the tool is worth building out, additional investment would be necessary — though it would cost less than purchasing subscriptions to ChatGPT or those models for state employees, Porat said.

As many state workers are aware, California agencies frequently use niche acronyms and specific language to refer to departments. Poppy is designed to interpret those government-specific terms, which might confuse publicly available GenAI models.

The intention of the project from the beginning, Porat said, was to build a tool that can make things easier for state workers and enhance their jobs.

“We’re not looking to come up with ways that we can use Poppy to straight-up replace or eliminate work,” he said. “But how can we use these kinds of tools to help people out?”

Poppy could help state workers save ‘so much time’

The application has access to 11 different large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to help state employees work more efficiently by allowing them to search internal documents more quickly.

Those models are available to the state as part of agreements with four cloud service providers, which include Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. The technology department is able to access versions of ChatGPT and other GenAI models through those agreements.

Porat noted that Poppy is unique because the AI tool is built on a state network, similar to the email service workers use. Anything uploaded or shared through state workers’ “chats” with Poppy stays within the government’s network, Porat noted.

“Off-the-shelf” AI tools don’t have this security feature, Porat said, but it is available to Poppy because the technology department built the application internally.

Shera Mui, deputy director of platform services, demonstrated how the AI assistant worked for The Sacramento Bee. The tool’s interface looks similar to that of ChatGPT, which allows users to type questions into a search bar and provides a response below

When asked about California’s policies for software procurement, Poppy’s response identified relevant pages in California’ State Administrative Manual, a document outlining state regulations that is more than 500 pages long. The administrative manual was one example of a state-specific resource Poppy pulls from to answer state workers’ questions.

“That can save you so much time,” Mui said.

Mui said she uses Poppy to help target messages for different audiences. For example, Mui said she used the AI tool to help craft messages about technical information for non-technical groups of people working for the state.

Getting feedback from a wide range of state workers

The AI tool was developed as part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023 executive order directing departments to explore how artificial intelligence could be used to improve state government. The governor announced the AI assistant earlier this month when he unveiled a new council of policy experts and researchers who have been tasked to study the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence in state government.

Poppy was initially tested earlier this year with a handful of employees across several departments. Now, the AI tool is being used by over 2,000 state employees across 50 departments, Porat said.

He noted that the technology department is encouraging employees from a range of classifications to use and experiment with Poppy, so “that we can get as much feedback as possible from different ways that people might use the tool.”

Based on the feedback Porat and his team have received, lawyers and administrative professionals working for the state have both found the tool particularly useful, he said.

Monica Hernández, a technology department spokesperson, said the agency invested roughly $62,000 to build the pilot.

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