Clerk of the Superior Court in Maricopa County

Solution

The Clerk of the Superior Court in Maricopa County built Cleo, a virtual assistant powered by IBM watsonx Assistant, to centralize self-service support for citizens and staff. The project evolved from internal ChatOps experiments into an enterprise-grade conversational system that could survive beyond its original creator and be maintained by non-specialists. Watsonx Assistant became the operational core, giving the Clerk's Office a natural-language interface that could interpret requests, answer high-volume questions and route people without dead ends across existing customer-service channels. The design goal was not just to deflect calls, but to provide fair and timely access to public services such as record requests, marriage licenses and passport renewals even when employees were not physically present. By shifting routine inquiries to Cleo, the office created a scalable public-service support layer that reduced call burden and improved service continuity.

Data flow

Citizen and employee questions enter Cleo through customer-service channels, watsonx Assistant interprets intent and returns an answer or guided next step, and unresolved requests are routed onward instead of forcing callers to restart the process.