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Artificial Intelligence (AI): society’s newest buzzword.
In an age where technology is reshaping processes in nearly every industry, AI presents exciting opportunities as well as notable privacy and bias risks for municipalities.
Tripepi Smith assembled a panel at the most recent League of California Cities (Cal Cities) City Managers Conference on AI and empowering municipalities through new technology To kick it off, Sunil Rajaraman from Hamlet wowed the audience by using AI to clone an attendee's voice and having it say whatever he wanted. It took seconds for this tool to mimic the person's voice and, as you can imagine, sparked both amazement and a little fear in the audience. His company, Hamlet, provides AI-powered solutions for summarizing city council and planning commission meetings into unbiased 500 word summaries. As a “comms guy” I think that is pretty nifty, so much so that I became an advisor to his firm.
AI can be scary and thrilling at the same time, like a roller coaster. To address the scary part, city leaders should work to understand the nuances of AI implementation to ensure its benefits are maximized and pitfalls are mitigated. While AI applications raise ethical questions regarding accountability and transparency, leveraging AI responsibly can enhance service delivery, dramatically increase productivity and harness complex and historical knowledge to empower residents or your own city staff.
At Tripepi Smith, we have worked with dozens of cities to help them innovate. Now we are working hard to ramp up our AI knowledge to help public agencies learn about and explore this new technology. We believe if we equip our clients with the knowledge and tools necessary to leverage AI for good, everyone wins: our communities, city staff, elected leaders and civilization.
Tripepi Smith is engaged in the AI journey and looks forward to learning and sharing as we continue down the path that this new technology is carving into the marble of our organizations.
Written by a human,
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