America’s largest retirement community, median age 68.5, ran a time-bound pilot and then put AI on the county’s phones for a full year. Its 162,000 residents made 101,300 calls to it in year one.
The Story
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In 1853, the Florida legislature carved Sumter County out of central pinelands and named it for General Thomas Sumter, the Revolutionary War cavalryman they called “The Gamecock.” The county seat settled into the railroad stop of Bushnell in 1909.
For the century that followed, it stayed quiet farm country, living on citrus, cattle, and timber with fewer than ten thousand residents into the 1950s.
In 1972, a developer named Harold Schwartz bought a small mobile-home park on the Sumter line and began selling lots to retirees. His son Gary Morse expanded it relentlessly, adding lots, amenities, golf, and town squares with nightly music until it had a name of its own: The Villages.
By the 2010s, that pasture experiment had become the country’s largest retirement community, sprawling across Sumter, Lake, and Marion counties as the population doubled, then nearly doubled again.
By 2025, Sumter was the fastest-growing county in Florida and one of the fastest in the nation, with a population near 162,000. At a median age of 68.5 it was the oldest county in the United States, and demand on its non-emergency phone lines never let up.
The county team is excellent, but it is finite, and the calls kept coming: 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 team didn’t cut a forklift switchover. They turned on Animal Services, watched it for three weeks, then turned on Building Services. Through the end of September that was the whole deployment: two department lines, every call reviewed, the agents tuned on real residents.
Phase 1
Time-bound
Jul 22 to Sep 30, 2025
Went live: Animal Services, then Building Services three weeks later.
The decision: Keep it small and watch every call. Two department lines, no switchboard exposure, agents tuned on real residents before anything else went live.
Phase 2
12 months
Oct 1, 2025 to Sep 30, 2026
Went live: Community Responder, Citizens Information Center, Veterans Services, Fire Chief.
The decision: Put the main county line in overflow first, flip it to 24/7 primary on January 30, then let agents hand callers to each other inside one call from May.
Handled without staff, month by month
From 49% in the first month of the pilot to 72% today.
Year-one average 67%
Each bar is the share of callers that month handled by an agent without a county employee, on a 40% to 80% axis. The dip in fall 2025 is the Citizens Information Center arriving in overflow mode and catching the hardest, longest-held calls first. The highlighted bar is the most recent month.
Year one began on October 1, 2025 with the pilot’s verdict in hand. Through the fall the county added Community Responder and then the big one, the Citizens Information Center, in overflow mode only: a call had to sit on hold for fifteen seconds before it got routed to EffiGov. About 8 calls a day slipped through. Total volume held near 1,700 a month.
Then, on January 30, 2026, the county flipped CIC to 24/7 primary: every public call now lands there first. Daily volume went from 8 to 300 and never came back down. Monthly volume jumped from ~2,200 to ~10,600. In May the agents learned to hand a caller to another department inside the same call, and the county quietly routed Animal Services and Veterans Services behind that one front door. By summer the system was taking 12,000 to 13,000 calls a month.
The rollout, milestone by milestone
Across the first year, six agents took ~101,300 calls from about 87,000 unique callers. The share handled without a county employee climbed from 49% in the first month of the pilot to 72% today. The rest are warm-transferred to the right specialist on the first try.
Sumter doesn’t just prove voice AI can scale.
It proves the demographic we said couldn’t be served by it, can.
The volume
Each colored layer is one agent. The full stack is what Sumter’s residents talk to every month. The shaded strip is the pilot. The jump in February is the day CIC went 24/7 primary.
Total calls
105,100
Jul 2025 to Sep 2026 · 101,300 in year one
How calls are counted: from May 2026, a call that the Citizens Information Center hands to another department inside the same call counts once for each agent it reached, about 1 in 4 callers. Before handoffs existed, that caller had to hang up and redial, which logged as two separate calls, so the method keeps every month comparable. Year one was 101,300 agent interactions from 87,200 unique callers.
The integrated web
Every call into Sumter County lands on the Citizens Information Center first. From there it routes to the right specialist agent. The caller never has to start the conversation over.
A real call, in motion
A resident calls about their dog’s rabies license. CIC hands off to Animal Services at 0:13, which answers it and texts the portal link. No redial, no hold.
Thank you for calling Sumter County. Call may be recorded to help provide assistance. How can I help you today?
Hi. Thought I was calling animal services.
I can assist with animal services. Please tell me more about your question.
Yeah. A question about the dog license and rabies vaccination verification. I have an old tag on my dog's collar, I just realized. So how do I get an updated one that suffices for a rabies tag?
In Sumter County, all dogs, cats, and ferrets four months or older must be licensed and have a current rabies vaccination. Pet licenses are free of charge. You can submit proof of vaccination by email to administrativeservices@sumtercountyfl.gov, or by mail or in person to the Sumter County Service Center at 7375 Powell Road, Wildwood, FL 34785. Once proof is received, the license will be mailed to you. If a veterinarian has provided a medical exemption from vaccination, a license is still required, and proof of the exemption must be submitted. Would you like me to text you the official web page link with more information on pet licensing?
Yes, please.
I have your phone number as X X X, X X X, X X X X. Is that the best number to send the link to?
Yes.
Sending the text now.
Okay. Can I ask a question?
Of course. What would you like to know?
Are you a real person?
I am an automated assistant designed to help with Sumter County Animal Services inquiries. How can I assist you further?
Okay. I'm done. Thank you very much.
You're welcome. Thank you for calling Sumter County Animal Services. Have a great day.
Bye.
Goodbye. Take care.
Real call · May 29, 2026 · lightly edited for transcription errors, phone number anonymized
Live in Sumter County
Tap any agent to play a recent, lightly anonymized call from production.
Live in Sumter County
·Live since Nov 17, 2025
The main intake line for the entire county. Routes new callers, answers general questions, files service requests, and hands off to the right department. Became the county's front door in February 2026 and, since May, hands callers to other departments inside the same call.
At a glance
Main intake · highest volume in the fleet
Hi. I am calling to see if you are open for, I guess, trash drop-off today.
Yes. The Citizens drop-off area is open today, Saturday, May 30th, 2026.
Okay.
The hours of operation are 7 AM to 5 PM. Want me to text you more information about the drop-off area, including accepted items and fees?
Yes.
Sending the text now.
Thank you.
What the agent did
Real call · May 2026. Lightly edited for length.
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.
Who runs the line
Executive sponsor · Champion
Assistant County Administrator
Sumter County, Florida
Before, and after
Before EffiGov, Sumter’s phones rang the way they do in every fast-growing county: constantly, and never evenly. A retiree in The Villages calling a department about a permit landed in a voicemail box. A call that came in over the weekend could sit unanswered until Monday.
Stephen didn’t fix that with a moonshot. He turned on one agent, Animal Services, in July 2025 and watched it for three weeks before adding the next. One department at a time, until the county trusted it enough to route every call through it on January 30.
He’s now the person other Florida administrators call when they want to do the same thing. The playbook Sumter wrote is the template.
The other ledger
Year one was 101,300 calls, and the county now runs at 12,000+ a month (about 145,000 a year). At roughly three minutes a call that is 5,100 to 7,200 hours of work a year, and because real staff are on calls only about 60% of the day once you count breaks, after-call work, and the gaps between calls, that’s the workload of four to six full-time positions.
Whose hours come back
And the time doesn’t just come back to a receptionist. It comes back to the people who used to field these calls themselves.
Impact
Webinar recording · 1 hour
The implementation story behind these numbers: Stephen Kennedy, Assistant County Administrator, on the rollout order, what broke, and the lessons from a year in production.
Sumter County’s deployment is the template. Six departments, 24/7 multilingual, deployed in weeks. Not a forklift IT migration.
