Louisville names inaugural chief AI officer

Louisville has appointed its first Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO), naming Pamela McKnight (pictured) to lead the city’s enterprise-wide AI strategy.

Announcing the role, Craig Greenberg, Mayor of Louisville, said McKnight “returns home to Kentucky to join us to harness the power of technology, to find ways to use AI technologies to make our Louisville government services more effective and more efficient to better serve you.” He added that investing in “thoughtful, human-centric innovation” would help teams focus more on serving residents and less on repetitive tasks.

McKnight joins Louisville after nearly 30 years at Intel, where she directed large-scale transformation initiatives in AI upskilling, adoption, leadership development, and organisational change. Her work included an AI upskilling effort that drove over 30,000 engagements with generative AI tools in six months, boosting operational efficiency and generating measurable cost avoidance.

She also developed governance frameworks, performance metrics, and risk and readiness strategies to support adoption across global teams, and led programmes that increased employee engagement and retention.

On taking up the new role, McKnight said she was excited to join the Louisville Metro Government team.

“Our mission is simple, to harness the power of AI in order to enable our employees to better serve citizens,” she said. Her focus, she added, will be on “building human-centric solutions that improve everyday experiences, from faster responses to streamlined services, while keeping people at the centre of innovation”.

McKnight describes her approach as placing transparency, fairness, trust, and community alignment at the forefront of AI deployment. According to her overview of the position, priorities include streamlining permitting, improving response times, reducing wait times for public records, and using data to support smarter infrastructure planning. She also emphasises a core guiding principle: “AI as an enabler. People at the centre. Progress for all.”

Her appointment creates a new leadership function within Louisville Metro Government, established to coordinate AI adoption across departments in collaboration with the CIO. Greenberg said the role is critical as the city works to build “a stronger, more innovative, more effective, and more efficient Louisville.”

Image: McKnight/LinkedIn