With more than 292,000 residents, the Town of Gilbert, Arizona boasts the population, infrastructure, and amenities of a top city. But it maintains the community and heart of a close-knit town. The mid-sized community is ranked first in economic growth in the United States, and it’s consistently recognized as one of the top 20 places to raise a family, own a small business, or find a job.

A key driver behind the city’s success is its forward-thinking local government. The town embraces innovation and technology with its 1,800 employees to enhance daily life. Gilbert blends history with modern advances — solidifying its reputation as a community of the future.

“We see technology as a differentiator in how we improve services and the quality of life for our community,” says Sasan Poureetezadi, CTO of the Town of Gilbert. “But rather than driving technology from the IT department, we work to put technology into users’ hands as quickly as possible. That’s how we scale innovation and find unique use cases that make the biggest difference for our citizens.”

A vision for a smart, secure future.

The town is especially enthusiastic about the power AI can bring to its offerings. “If we do it right, AI has the potential to be a force multiplier that fundamentally changes how we operate and serve citizens,” says assistant town manager Mary Goodman, who oversees daily operations including technology adoption. With her and the Town Manager’s support, the town created a new position focused on AI and emerging technologies.

Enter Eugene Mejia, Gilbert’s newly appointed chief AI strategy and digital transformation officer. As he began to explore available AI tools on the market, he discovered that transformational AI was already within reach through Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Express — two popular apps available to every Gilbert employee. With AI-powered capabilities such as Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant and Adobe Firefly-powered creative features in Adobe Express, employees have the potential to boost productivity and better serve citizens.

As a government entity, ensuring compliance and security when using AI is critical to protecting privileged information. “Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant and Adobe Firefly met all of our requirements and gave us the confidence to expand their use without compromising citizen data,” says Jason Thompson, IT customer experience manager.

Productivity gains citywide with Acrobat AI Assistant.

Gilbert employees already use Adobe apps through an enterprise license agreement (ELA), enhancing creativity and productivity for all employees. Every year, city employees process millions of pages of documents as PDFs via Adobe Acrobat and finalize documents with Acrobat Sign. Meanwhile, Adobe Creative Cloud helps teams communicate more consistently, creatively, and effectively with the public.

More than a dozen departments — from domestic violence to law enforcement — are using Acrobat AI Assistant to dramatically cut down time spent on document work. With Acrobat AI Assistant, staff can use generated summaries, simple text prompts, and intelligent citations to analyze and understand the information in their documents quickly and easily. The finance department, for example, can compare spending information across multiple documents spanning several years, while the IT team can distill lengthy technical reports into clear briefs to help executives quickly understand emerging technologies.

Other departments use the AI-powered chat capability to draft new content from scratch. When the city decided to hire a dedicated grant coordinator, human resources used Acrobat AI Assistant to analyze a 50-page report on grant challenges against industry standards and generate a custom job description.

“Acrobat AI Assistant helps us stay competitive in the job market, making sure we’re positioned to attract the right people at the right time,” says Mejia. “The AI capabilities probably saved us months of researching and refining the job description. We found a great grant coordinator quickly to help us start delivering more services for our citizens.”

Today, the grant coordinator is also using Acrobat AI Assistant to accelerate grant evaluation. What used to take a whole day to analyze a 20-page grant is now five times faster, taking just minutes to summarize key criteria, requirements, deadlines, and action items. With up to 80 grants in the queue for review annually, the town can secure vital funding for affordable housing, water conservation, fire response, and more — quicker than ever before.

“We’re saving at least 40 hours of work per grant with Acrobat AI Assistant,” says Mejia. “That creates huge efficiencies and opportunities that we can use to apply for even more grants, ultimately benefitting citizens with better services and community.”

Creativity and innovation for all.

Clear communications are key for all city departments. Many employees embraced Adobe Express for its speed and ease of use to create eye-catching brochures and announcements with less effort. Working with on-brand templates and a massive library of Adobe assets — including stock photos, music, sound, fonts and graphic elements — they can easily create signage for events, professional-looking flyers for internal workshops, or social media posts for holidays like Mother’s Day.

With a few simple prompts, generative AI capabilities powered by Adobe Firefly in Adobe Express enable anyone to quickly create custom, eye-catching graphics. This allows the town’s creative team to focus on high-level branding, graphics, and infographics.

“By democratizing access to Adobe apps and taking advantage of generative AI capabilities, we’re scaling innovation to find new use cases that make the biggest difference for serving citizens,” says Poureetezadi. “It’s the people who work and live here that make Gilbert such a wonderful place, and the more we can get everyone involved, the better it becomes.”

Heather Whitlock is a director at Adobe, responsible for customer strategy and success within Digital Media across key industries including public sector, financial services, and healthcare. She focuses on empowering customers to unlock value and thrive within their organization by harnessing Adobe's emerging technologies including Adobe Express, Firefly, and Acrobat. Heather specializes in driving value through strategic engagement, working closely with customers to align their vision and business objectives with innovative solutions. Prior to Adobe, she served as a managing director at Accenture, overseeing growth, talent, and customer success for global clients in regulated industries.