City CIOs urged to lay the foundations for generative AI

The London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) has produced a collection of guides to support local authorities in using generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney and Dall-E.

The resources include a guide for local authority leaders and another aimed at all staff, as well as a guide designed specifically for council Chief Information Officers (CIOs), which was developed with AI software company Faculty.

Sam Nutt, Researcher and Data Ethicist at LOTI, a membership organisation for over 20 boroughs and the Greater London Authority, told Cities Today: “Generative AI won’t solve every problem for local governments, but it could be a catalyst to transform so many processes for how we work.

“On the one hand, personal assistants integrated into programmes like Word, Excel or Powerpoint could massively improve officer productivity. On another level there is a chance to reimagine services and government entirely, thinking about how gen AI models can do so many tasks with data that we couldn’t do before, and allow officers to completely change how they spend their time.

“There are both opportunities and challenges, but the key message on both is that local governments should be ambitious in using this ‘AI moment’ to reimagine and redesign our ways of working to be better at delivering services now and in the future for our residents.”

As an initial step, local governments are advised to provide training and guidelines for staff. Some have begun to implement these steps, including US cities such as Boston, Seattle and San Jose.

Nutt stressed that generative AI policies are useful but not a silver bullet for governance and that they will need to be revisited and updated regularly as technology and regulations evolve.

Infrastructure

The CIO guidance also focuses on how IT leaders should begin to prepare their technical foundations. This includes assessing and developing data infrastructure and data management plans to reduce barriers to the future use of generative AI, and developing product roadmaps for generative AI which are explicit about how it could support the council’s strategic goals.

CIOs are recommended to conduct a staff skills audit to determine whether new roles are required to support the safe implementation of generative AI. They should also estimate implementation costs related to data management, system upgrades, training and ongoing maintenance to understand the feasibility of use cases.

Once these foundations and an AI governance policy are in place, CIOs are encouraged to support experiments with lower risk, high impact prototypes to better understand generative AI’s potential in local government.

Use cases

LOTI conducted a research survey which found that some early adopters in local government are already experimenting with generative AI while others are taking a more cautious approach. The top council use cases reported were creating and editing documents and generating and checking code for software applications. Other use cases include conducting research, powering chatbots, analysing data for trends, and predictive analytics.

According to the CIO guide: “As we move forwards, the most impactful use cases of leveraging genAI will probably come from councils contextualising genAI models in their own data and integrating them into their end products. These models will likely be accessed through platforms like Microsoft’s Azure AI, through APIs, or are open-source.”

It says that this approach allows for greater customisation of products by giving models access to internal council-held data and reduces the risk of “hallucination”.

Nutt said that the research showed how widespread the interest and use of generative AI tools is among local authority staff, often without any prompting from digital or data leaders. For example, one London council’s internal survey found that 92 percent of staff wanted training in generative AI.

“I imagine that is much higher than any other technology,” said Nutt.

In another council outside of London, the first prototype use case came from the communities team, rather than the data team.

Duty of care

LOTI’s guidance notes that due to the sensitive and private nature of data held by local authorities, there is a greater duty of care associated with the use of generative AI, and there are also potential reputational risks if it is used irresponsibly by staff.

“The key for councils and for LOTI will be to harness this organic excitement for AI in a responsible way,” Nutt commented. “We want to help authorities build responsible and ethical practices from the start, which would serve as the foundation for ambitious efforts to use AI to improve how we design services and city governments.”

He added that councils need to also prepare for much greater use of generative AI by residents, “whether that be responding to AI-written complaints or helping future AI chatbots know what day to tell their user to put the bins out.”