Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud and Google Public Sector CEO Karen Dahut talk on the stage at The Henry Ford (Michael Kuentz – For MediaNews Group)

In a small intimate reception that saw Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud host Google Public Sector CEO Karen Dahut, the two entities announced a new partnership and talked about positive changes coming to the city.

The event was held at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. About 100 people attended the invite only event.

The audience consisted of city leaders, elected officials, and leaders from the public, non-profit, and business sectors across the region and state.

Google Public Sector, or Google Government, which launched last June has a bevy of functions that will help the City offer services on a 24/7 basis all year.

Dahut said her company was founded on the notion of taking data and making the lives of humans “across the globe,” better.

“We have this great partnership between Google Public Sector and the great City of Dearborn,” she said.

Hammoud said that with her help, the partnership will thrive.

“We often see innovation and transformation in the private sector, but lagging in the public sector.,” he said. “The idea was that the Dearborn government slowed down its residents.”

Hammoud said he wants to innovate how services are provided to speed up those interactions.

“How do we keep up the pace with our residents,” he asked. “When you have a partner who can take something complex and simplify it, you produce a win-win for all entities.”

Specifics of the partnership weren’t revealed during the 45 minute presentation, instead Hammoud and Dahut focused on the highlights of promoting Dearborn, the fastest growing city in Michigan.

Google Public Sector was formed in June.

According to a release from Google, the new division operates as a subsidiary of Google LLC and specializes in bringing Google Cloud technologies, including Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace, to U.S. public sector customers.

Google Public Sector provides unique products and expertise, such as Google Cloud’s data and analytics platform, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) tools, so institutions can better understand their data and automate core processes. The division offers Google Cloud’s highly scalable and reliable open infrastructure, including compute, storage, and networking, so government agencies can modernize their legacy information systems and build new applications that serve citizens with mission-critical reliability and scalability.

Many of those features are what Hammoud was looking for to modernize certain aspects of the city, including the website, and functions to make the site work for residents better.

Hammoud said the ability to translate documents and such quickly will be an immense help to the city, which has the largest population of Arab-Americans in the country.

Hammoud and Dahut mostly talked about how Google’s technology can increase the quality of life for Dearborn residents.

“This started because we were told Google could do a traffic study,” Hammoud said. “From there we’ve kept asking them for things and their team hasn’t said no.”

Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist was supposed to moderate the panel, but didn’t make it due to the Feb. 22 ice storms.