Future of AI in Government

Wharton Alumni AI Studio and Wharton Club de France invite you to Event with the Co-Founders of Civic - a Startup Founded by two Wharton Graduates

Join us for an online event with Jon and Julian, the co-founders of Civic.

Civic Introduces AI to Capitol Hill

Congressional offices are underwater, struggling with outdated system; meanwhile, Congress has the lowest approval rate in history.  This summer, Civic released its flagship product on Capitol Hill, bringing AI to improve comms and data management.  In this session, Jon (CEO) and Julian (CTO) describe the problem, solution, and future of AI in government.

Civic has created the first AI-native automation tool for government communications, workflows, and data.  Starting with Capitol Hill, they're transforming email inbound/outbound, casework, data analytics, and outreach - saving time and money while improving outcomes for citizens.  In the future, Civic's AI agents will be doing administrative work in all corners of the government, addressing a $45B admin overhead.

Jon Kokot WG'2025

Jon is a 10-year Navy veteran who served as a pilot, Senate liaison, and supervisor to a 200-person department on an aircraft carrier. He led small and large teams across three deployments and fostered relationships with 39 Senate/House offices during his three years on Capitol Hill. He received special recognition from Senator Roger Wicker and former First Lady Jill Biden for his work in the Senate and the White House, respectively.  He worked briefly at Blackstone, Lazard, and Nominal.  He has a Wharton MBA and an engineering degree from Vanderbilt. 

Julian Trajanson, W'12

Juian has nine years of ML and software development experience across enterprise and startups. He was the first engineer at Walmart’s AI Center for Excellence, a team that has grown to over 100 people.  He was the founding engineer at Raspberry AI (raised $25M from a16z) and the CTO of AI startup Kismet.  He hosts AI paper sessions attended by executives at Walmart, Nike, and Meta. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence and building web platforms. He founded Premier Biomedical and holds a B.S. from Wharton.

How Civic uses AI: 

1. 1. read inbound constituent emails and extract relevant data to create data-rich constituent profiles
   2. triage and batch emails together based on content similarity (e.g. bill #) and POV (for/against)
   3. use an office’s data room to write content in the Congressperson's voice, using their "digital twin"
   4. search the internet for information on relevant bills and news associated with an inbound email/phone call/voicemail 
   5. gatekeep bad messages from going out (reputational security)
   6. use congress.gov API to trigger smart outreach to constituents, providing updates to citizenry on legislative actions
   7. agentic AI to complete casework actions (e.g. sending documents, prompting constituents to submit signed paperwork, requesting action from federal agency)