St. Louis Startup Makes AI Listen to Government Meetings So You Don't Have To

As the former chief of staff for Kansas City Mayor Quenton Lucas, John Stamm knows just how tedious local government meetings can be. But he's also aware of just how important they are — and that's why his brand-new startup is aimed at cutting through the tedium and getting people the information they need about what their government is up to.

Stamm's company is called Hello Citizen, and the premise is pretty simple: He trains artificial intelligence to listen in on the meetings of local government, many of which are now helpfully posted online. Then, for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee, Hello Citizen will send a succinct report with all the highlights.

A simple premise, yes, but suffice it to say, it's not nearly as easy to execute as simply training ChatGPT on the Board of Aldermen and letting it strut its stuff. Says Stamm, "A really tricky part of figuring this out was that the original version would mistake the time spent on a topic for its importance. I had to train it to focus on a little more important items."

Stamm does not see Hello Citizen replacing journalists — beyond the fact that many government meetings don't even have journalists attending them in this cash-strapped age for the newspaper industry, the reports are relatively brief. They're meant as an aid to cue people to the areas they want to know more about, not replace a human actually listening to the key points. Because of that, it could actually end up a useful tool for journalists more than the general public.

"It's just taking the long hours spent in this really boring meeting and boils it down to, 'Here's the points of conflict,'" Stamm says. "'Here's what you'd want to pay attention to on this recording.'" He adds, "It takes a lot of grunt work out of reporting so you can focus on higher value tasks, like talking to a councilmember about the issues."

Ultimately, though, the target audience is less gadflies and the handful of people who genuinely care about the business of government than a potentially more lucrative client base — companies that spend money to monitor what's happening the halls of power. Law firms and lobbyists with an interest in what's happening at City Hall often send junior staffers to sit through meetings, as do related government agencies. Hello Citizen could save those staffers a lot of time.

Stamm notes, for example, that a few days before reporters got wind of the plan to park the Rams' settlement money into an endowment, he read a report with that same information thanks to Hello Citizen. "These may be things that are discussed in public meetings and later shared widely through official reports, but official reports take time to come out," he says. "If you have Hello Citizen sit through this meeting, you'll know it sooner."

Hello Citizen launched on January 17 with coverage of St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, University City, Kansas City and four other jurisdictions. Plans start at just $2 a month, with the next tier (which gets you to access to many more meetings) and $15 a month. "It's pegged to the price of Netflix," Stamm says.

Stamm is a Kansas City native who was living in St. Louis when a politician friend he'd volunteered for years before, Lucas, decided to make a run for mayor. At age 27, and with no experience running campaigns, Stamm moved back to Kansas City and guided Lucas to an unexpected victory. Stamm then signed on as the new mayor's chief of staff.

"I was at the Chiefs first Super Bowl, and I was thinking, 'This is the best job in the world.' Then COVID hit, and it was the worst job in the world," he says.  Making it even harder was the fact that his wife had a job at Wash U. After being long distance for two years, he moved back to St. Louis in 2022.

Since then, he's dabbled in consulted and served as interim executive director at the Central Reform Congregation. He also started a tea company. But the idea for Hello Citizen was always on his mind. "I knew I wanted to get into AI," he says.

Now he's looking to bring that AI far beyond the initial launch cities. "Once we iron out the errors and the bugs and the kinks in the process, there's a short list of cities I'm looking to be in next," he says. "We do plan to roll out pretty rapidly across the country."


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