Sumter County, Florida deploys EffiGov voice AI across six departments, handling 52,400 calls in 10 months

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Sumter County, Florida deploys EffiGov voice AI across six departments, handling 52,400 calls in 10 months

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Sumter County, Florida, America’s largest retirement community with a population of 162,403 and median age 68.5 (the oldest county in the United States), deployed EffiGov voice AI agents across six departments over ten months from July 2025 to May 2026. The deployment handled 52,400 calls with 72% resolved without staff intervention. Demand on Sumter’s non-emergency phone lines never let up. Veterans needing help finding ID cards on weekends, new residents asking Animal Services whether visiting grandchildren could adopt a dog, hours of inspection-status calls into Building Services every week. This retiree demographic was not the one B2B SaaS demos promise will adopt voice AI, but it was the one calling. On July 22, 2025, Sumter became the first county-level EffiGov customer in Florida. The rollout was phased one agent at a time: Animal Services (Jul 22, 2025), Building Services (Aug 14), Community Responder (Oct 14), Citizens Information Center live in overflow only (Nov 17), Veterans Services (Jan 22, 2026), Fire Chief (Jan 28), and Citizens Information Center flipped to 24/7 primary (Jan 30, 2026), where every public call now lands there first. Daily volume jumped from 8 to 300 calls when CIC went 24/7 primary. Monthly volume jumped from approximately 2,200 to approximately 10,600 and held above 10,000 every month since, peaking near 11,100 in May. About 72% of calls get handled without ever reaching a county employee. The rest are warm-transferred to the right specialist on the first try. At its steady rate of about 11,000 calls a month (132,000 a year), that’s roughly 6,600 hours of talk time, and because real staff are on calls only about 60% of the day once breaks, after-call work, and gaps are factored in, that’s the workload of approximately 5 full-time positions. As Stephen Kennedy, Assistant County Administrator of Sumter County, said: 'My team didn’t get smaller. We just stopped drowning in the calls that never needed a person, so now they spend their time on the residents who do.' A real call from May 29, 2026 is transcribed in full: a resident called Animal Services about a dog license and rabies vaccination verification, and the agent answered questions and sent the official web page link via SMS, all without human intervention. Real-time translations and SMS follow-ups are supported out of the box.