Chatgpt helps to write the speeches of this mayor. Now he wants a thousand workers in the city to use AI
Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrived at a ribbon cup ceremony for a new company, his collaborators ask Chatgpt to help write discussion points.
“Elected officials are a lot of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent route has taken him out of restoration and semiconductor startups to a lowdringing car culture festival.
Other politicians could be tightened to admit a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that he helped write a budget of $ 5.6 billion for the new exercise, but Mahan tries to give an example, pushing an increasing number of 7,000 government employees who run the largest city in Silicon Valley to adopt artificial intelligence technology.
Mahan said that the adoption of AI tools will eliminate beating work and help the city better serve its million residents.
He is hardly the only leader in the public or private sector leading an AI OU-BUST strategy, although, in some cases, workers have found that expensive technology can add hassles or errors.
“The idea is to try things, to be really transparent, to seek problems, to report them, to share them between different government agencies, then to work with sellers and internal teams to solve problems,” said Mahan in an interview. “It’s always bumpy with new technologies.”
By next year, the city intends to have 1,000, about 15%, of its workers formed to use AI tools for a variety of tasks, including the response of complaints from poule.
One of the first adopters of San Jose was Andrea Arjona Amador, who directs the electric mobility programs in the city’s transport service. It has already used Chatgpt to guarantee a subsidy of $ 12 million for electric vehicle chargers.
Arjona Amador created a personalized “IA agent” to examine the correspondence she received concerning various subsidy proposals and asked her to help organize incoming information, including maturity dates. Then she had aid to write the 20 -page document.
So far, San Jose has spent more than $ 35,000 to buy 89 Chatgpt licenses – $ 400 per account – for city workers.
“The way it worked, before we started using it, we spent a lot of evenings and weekends trying to get subsidies to the finish line,” she said. The Trump administration then canceled the funding, it therefore presented a proposal similar to a regional donor not linked to the federal government.
Arjona Amador, who learned Spanish and French before she learned English, also created another personalized chatbot to modify the tone and language of her professional writings.
With close relations with some of the largest players in the technology industry, including Openai based in San Francisco and Google based in Mountain View, mayors of the largest cities in the bay region help promote the type of AI adoption that technological industry is striving, while promising guidelines and standards to avoid damage to technology.
The mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, announced on Monday a plan to give nearly 30,000 city workers, including nurses and social workers, access to the Copilot chatbot of Microsoft, which is based on the same technology that feeds Chatgpt. The San Francisco plan indicates that it is delivered with “guarantees of confidentiality and robust bias, and clear directives to ensure that technology improves – not replaces them – human judgment”.
San Jose has similar guidelines and has not yet reported significant misadventures with its pilot projects. Such problems drew attention elsewhere due to the propensity of technology to spit false information, called hallucinations.
Chatgpt digital fingerprints were found on a document filled with errors published in May by the Commission “Make America Healthy Again” by the American Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr.
In Fresno, California, a school official was forced to resign after saying that she trusted an AI chatbot too much who made information in a document.
While some government agencies have been secret when they turn to chatbots to get help, Mahan is open to his basic memos written by Chatgpt to which he turns during the pronunciation of speeches.
“Historically, it would have taken hours of telephone and reading calls, and you could never have obtained these ideas,” he said. “You can eliminate these tasks at a similar level of quality or better in much less time.”
However, he added that “you always need a human being in the loop. You cannot just press a few buttons and trust the output. You must always do an independent verification. You must have a logic and common sense and ask questions.”
Earlier this year, when Openai introduced a new pilot product called operator, he promised a new type of tool that was going beyond the capacities of a chatbot. Instead of simply analyzing documents and producing text passages, it could also access a computer system and plan calendars or perform tasks in the name of a person. Developing and selling such “AI agents” is now a key objective for technology industry.
More than an hour’s drive east of Silicon Valley, where the Bay region merges in the country of the Central Valley farm, Jamil Niazi, director of information technology in the city of Stockton, had large visions for what it could do with such an agent.
Maybe the parks and leisure service could let an AI agent help residents book a public park or a swimming pool for a birthday party. Or the residents could discover how crowded the swimming pool before packing their swimming clothes.
Six months later, however, after finishing a phase of concept proof, the city did not buy a complete license for technology due to the cost.
The market study group, Gartner, recently predicted that more than 40% of “AI agents” projects will be canceled before the end of 2027, “due to cost climbing, unclear commercial value or inadequate risk checks”.
The mayor of San Jose remains optimistic about the potential of these AI tools to help workers “in the bowels of bureaucracy” to quickly accelerate their digital documents.
“There is just an incredible amount of bureaucracy that major organizations have to have,” said Mahan. “Whether it is financing, accounting, HR or writing subsidies, these are the types of roles where we think that our employees can be 20 (to) 50% more productive – quickly.”
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