Ways AI Can Improve Municipal Government

Generative AI can be used to enhance and accelerate data analysis and decision-making. For example, say you were to receive a data set on crime statistics, equipment utilization, or program usage, and you want to know some basic statistics. You could upload a spreadsheet that contains the data and the AI will do that work for you, and can even flesh out the subsequent charts and graphs for a visualization.

AI can also be used to reduce the average time that is needed to resolve cybersecurity incidents through use of AI assistants that can provide guidance on alert triage and incident response. John Bacon, partner engineer at Google Cloud, says agencies typically face three key security challenges. The first he describes as “Threat Overload”, which refers to the increasing amount of cybersecurity threats, while their level of sophistication escalates as well. The second entails the “toil” associated with the implementation of how security is currently carried out. There are many burdensome and repetitive manual steps that must be executed as a counter measure. The final challenge represents the “talent gap” which refers to the lack of qualified security professionals to deal with these threats. Generative AI can assist in managing and ameliorating these threats.

Furthermore, AI can be useful in unifying your data on a single platform. One AI cloud-based platform can simply the integration of an organization’s data with AI tools. It can store and organize all structured data (e.g., forms and spreadsheets) and unstructured data (e.g., emails and word documents) into one location so that search engines and Generative AI can access and search through it in order to inform an AI model.

Understanding the Risks of AI Use

As more local governments seek to incorporate the use of AI into their procedures and operations, it becomes vital to comprehend the risks that come with the utilization of AI and the principles that govern its responsible use. As AI has advanced, legislation has emerged as a response to try and regulate their use, recognizing the byproduct of risk that AI imposes.

Some of the risks that should be considered by local officials as you explore utilization are AI are:

• AI tools are trained on real-world data and are crafted and influenced by real people. Requesting information from an AI tool may carry the veil of objectivity, but ultimately the information they provide can be affected by the biases and opinions of people programming them. Ignorance or indifference to this bias could lead to the perpetuation or amplification of existing societal biases, which in turn could result in ill treatment of vulnerable or disadvantaged communities. The manifestation of this could take form as inequitable resource allocation, discriminatory law enforcement practices, and so on and so forth.

• Generative AI possesses the capacity to provide information at a rapid pace, but in exchange, it carries the risk of producing information that is inaccurate. Depending heavily on AI generated content without checking other sources carries the risk of establishing misinformation as fact. This should especially be considered during times where local governments communicate with their residents.