Boston's CIO wants the public — and other city governments — to use his open-source agentic AI tools

Boston’s chief information officer, Santiago Garces, is betting on agentic artificial intelligence to transform the city’s open data into usable insights, and not just for data analysts, but for residents who are trying to better understand their communities. To make that vision real, the city in October launched a model context protocol, or MCP, server — an Anthropic-built software layer that allows a Claude AI model to securely interact with data sources, like Boston’s open data portal. More recently, Garces built a set of open-source “skills,” Anthropic’s term for workflow templates, which run on the city’s MCP server. Garces said he thinks of each skill as a different AI “agent.” Each skill, or agent, sets up a complex analytical workflow that can produce formatted tables and plain language to answer various questions. Developed with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Garces said the tools are designed to let anyone access and analyze city data, with the goal of expanding transparency, improving policymaking and broadening who can participate in data-driven decision-making. The MCP server, Garces said, acts as a foundational layer that allows the AI agents to interface with Boston’s open data system, which includes datasets on things like city infrastructure and public services. There are datasets on property records, trash schedules, snow emergency routes, public-school locati...