The people putting AI to work for their communities.

Nomination 1 of 2 · Nominated by a colleague

Bobbie Dame is a strong candidate for the Innovation Pioneer Award because she has consistently used GovAI to turn emerging AI capabilities into practical tools that solve real City problems often before there was an established template or playbook to follow.

Bobbie played an important role in the City’s implementation and adoption of GovAI, but her contribution went well beyond helping roll out the platform. She became an early internal builder and champion, using GovAI to create tools that demonstrated to staff what AI could actually do in a local government environment. Her work helped move the conversation from simply understanding AI to applying it in meaningful, operational ways.

A strong example is the procurement coaching tool she built in GovAI to help guide City staff through the procurement process. Procurement can be complex, particularly for employees who only navigate it occasionally.

Bobbie used GovAI to create a practical resource that helps staff understand requirements, identify appropriate next steps, and navigate the process with greater confidence and consistency. Rather than using AI as a novelty, she applied it to a real organizational challenge where institutional knowledge, process clarity, and staff support matter.

She also used GovAI to develop a Technology Modernization Plan dashboard, helping translate a large and complex body of modernization work into something more accessible and actionable. In addition, she built a capacity dashboard that gives greater visibility into workload, competing priorities, and organizational capacity.

These tools demonstrate her ability to use GovAI not just for content generation, but as a platform for creating decision-support tools that improve how information is organized, understood, and used.

Bobbie’s influence has also extended well beyond the tools themselves. By building tangible examples inside GovAI, she has helped other employees understand what is possible and has encouraged the broader team and City organization to think differently about how AI can support their work.

Her willingness to experiment, share lessons learned, and help others become comfortable with the technology has made her an important part of the City’s overall GovAI adoption.

Her leadership has also reached beyond Camarillo. Bobbie led two APWA sessions across Southern California focused on practical applications of AI for public works professionals, sharing lessons from the City’s experience with GovAI and demonstrating how public agencies can move from general interest in AI to practical, responsible use.

By educating peers across the region and showing real examples of how AI can support government operations, she has helped extend Camarillo’s learning into the broader public-sector community.

What makes Bobbie particularly deserving of the Innovation Pioneer Award is that she did not wait for someone else to define how GovAI should be used. She experimented, built practical tools, shared what worked, and helped others see how AI could improve everyday government operations.

Through the procurement coach, the TMP dashboard, the capacity dashboard, her leadership in GovAI implementation, and her two APWA sessions across Southern California, Bobbie has helped establish an early model for practical AI adoption at the City of Camarillo and has paved the way for others to build on that work.

Nomination 2 of 2 · Nominated by a colleague

When most of our organization was still getting acquainted with AI as a tool for chat, research on publicly available data, and wordsmithing, Bobbie Dame was already asking a bigger question: what else could it do? Without a playbook, a template, or a traditional technical background, Bobbie used GovAI to build working solutions to real operational problems, and in doing so showed the rest of the City what's possible.

Bobbie has a talent for spotting pain points others have learned to live with. She proactively taught herself to build interactive HTML pages powered by GovAI. Her Technology Modernization Plan simulator lets decision-makers model changes to the plan and instantly see the impact on staff capacity and budget.

Her Procurement Navigator turned a dense, complicated policy handbook into an interactive tool that guides users to answers quickly, freeing subject matter experts from answering the same questions again and again.

She built a cost-benefit dashboard to evaluate buying versus maintaining our existing police facility, giving leadership a clear, data-driven view of a major capital decision. She even transformed our MISAC award submission from a static PDF into an engaging, interactive web page.

Just as importantly, Bobbie thought about how to make this work sustainable. She came up with the idea of feeding the City's own design standards into GovAI as reference material, so every page she builds is consistent with the City's look and feel. She also uses AI to compile her department's accomplishments into a templated newsletter, making sure the work of her colleagues is recognized citywide.

Bobbie has also been the main collaborator on the GovAI City of Camarillo Policy Assistant, a tool that gives staff fast answers to common policy questions and returns valuable time to subject matter experts across the organization.

What sets Bobbie's work apart is the perspective behind it. Her background in finance and her role overseeing fleet, facilities, and IS for Administrative Services give her a big-picture view that shows up in everything she builds. Her tools aren't novelties; they solve real problems and support real decisions.

Bobbie doesn't keep what she learns to herself. She has presented at three APWA chapter meetings, sharing her approach and demoing solutions live using attendees' own data, in real time. There's no more convincing way to show people what AI can do than to do it with their information in front of them.

Her influence has even reached GovAI itself: Bobbie's dashboards have found their way into GovAI's own playbook for showing other agencies what the platform can do. Bobbie has inspired peers well beyond our City's walls.

Bobbie went first, before there was a path to follow, and then turned around and lit the way for everyone else.

Self-nomination

I am nominating myself for the Innovation Pioneer Award because I have been exploring practical and responsible ways to use AI, analytics, and automation to strengthen decision-making within County of Lambton Long-Term Care.

In my Decision Support and Informatics role, I have used AI as a collaborative tool to accelerate research, challenge assumptions, explore analytical approaches, and translate complex operational data into practical decision support.

This has contributed to work such as identifying staffing and unfilled-shift risk patterns, developing HR analytics, exploring how clinical data can better inform workload and operational planning, and improving manual reporting processes through automation.

I have focused on using AI not simply to generate answers, but to help move from operational question to analysis to actionable insight more efficiently. Just as importantly, I apply human judgment, organizational context, data validation, and critical thinking to ensure outputs are relevant and responsible.

My goal has been to demonstrate how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into municipal government to improve the way information is understood, uncover emerging risks, and support more proactive, evidence-informed decisions.