Recommended Actions
The following sections outline the actions recommended to build a robust strategic framework for AI in the City of Chicago.
CORE CAPACITY
To have the capacity to capitalize on opportunities and respond to events, working groups with citywide membership should be established to address AI research, governance, communication, and outreach.
Nurturing and building this internal capacity will also help the city be a good steward of public funds as there will likely be vendors who will be well positioned to capitalize on fears as well as desires to take advantage of this opportunity.
- AI LEAD – Establish an AI Lead to work with existing leadership to develop policy, communication, and governance for the use of AI within city government.
- Issue Guidelines –Immediately issue a short, clear policy that is easy to understand and follow for all employees at all levels. This will let employees safely use AI assistance that is already freely available for their own productivity.
- Describe acceptable use in terms of platforms and use cases.
- Provide practical advice for effective disclosure.
- Describe worker’s rights and expectations for privacy within the platform.
- Provide clear guidelines for safe and responsible usage.
- Simple educational use cases – Provide a set of easy to read and informative use case examples that can help employees engage productively with Generative AI, as well as establish the language for future discussion.
- Vet and recommend platforms and use cases – Research and recommend platforms and tools which are most ethically “aligned” and identify any platforms that may be prohibited. Continue to provide simple examples to illustrate usage.
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- AI task force – Identify Generative AI thought leaders and users within the city who can form a center of excellence for AI.
- Integrate AI into the workplace as quickly as possible. This is critical to cultivate a centralized and managed approach, as well as for risk management. It’s important to establish norms and best practices.
- Assess the costs and availability of products with new and existing vendors – Develop a market map of products and price points to understand which products best meet the city’s needs and provide the coverage that can avoid shadow IT and technical debt.
- Position the AI task force to provide vetting for AI vendor proposals
- Identify workforce target audiences – Work with the center of excellence to identify target audiences for tools and training to upskill and enable workers.
- AI task force – Leverage the AI task force as a forum for sharing ideas and best practices.
- Continual education and engagement – Continue to develop training for general and vendor specific AI use cases.
- Ongoing technical innovation – Use the AI Lead and center of excellence to engage with academic and corporate partners to develop partnership in future technical development.
- Ongoing policy innovation – Similarly, use the AI Lead and center of excellence to funnel connections with city policymakers, policy institutes and thought leaders on innovative uses for AI and resident outcomes.
Advanced Machine Learning models and Generative AI models represent the most advanced analytic use cases available today, but they rely on a solid foundation of data availability. In order to enable customized use cases within the city for the most beneficial use cases it requires an ongoing investment in systems to support data governance, security, and availability[6] . Aside from Large Language models related advanced AI applications include vision, speech recognition, and knowledge models.
[6] “ Government Technology. (2023, March 8). AI-Ready Government: A Roadmap for the Future. Retrieved from https://papers.govtech.com/AI-Ready-Government-A-Roadmap-for-the-Future-141293.html
- Partner with Data Services – Partner with the City to learn and provide guidance and support in the development of data catalogs and data inventories.
- Expectations and Requirements – Provide expectations and requirements to help internal data managers develop systems that ensure that data is captured in a format that can be integrated with machine learning and LLM model applications.
- Rely on public data standards where available, such as ISO, the Internet Engineering Task Force, GTFS.
- Favor systems with high observability and proactive data quality measurement.
- Test integration and consistency between data sources
- Promote Master Data Management for data providence and reconciliation.
- Ongoing best practices research and communication
- Ongoing engagement for implementation of best practices
Advanced Machine Learning models and Generative AI models represent the most advanced analytic use cases available today, but they rely on a solid foundation of data availability. In order to enable customized use cases within the city for the most beneficial use cases it requires an ongoing investment in systems to support data governance, security, and availability . Aside from Large Language models related advanced AI applications include vision, speech recognition, and knowledge models.
- Stand up a website, email, and contact form to provide a way for the public to communicate with the city regarding Artificial Intelligence.
- Community Outreach – Establish cross department committees to hold forums, focus groups, organize conferences, conduct surveys, answer calls, and respond to emails to engage the public on their experiences with AI, and create a communication network that reaches residents from all walks of life for an AI aware city.
- Develop intergovernmental communication channels and groups to facilitate cohesion at the local level, and to tap into resources at the state, federal, and international level.
- Develop classes and literature to help both children and adults identify misinformation and foster critical thinking.
- This outreach can be customized and targeted to specific audiences and integrated through collaboration with the library and the public school system.
- Education could be a requirement for certain application processes, or following certain offenses.
- Dedicate people in press office roles to communicate about AI to the public and make them aware of the city’s work, research partners, capabilities, data use, and other aspects of AI utilization in the city.