Roundtable/Working Meeting City Council Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Or afternoon. I just want it to be Friday. That's all. Thank you so much for joining with the quorum being present. This afternoon's August 6th, 2026 roundtable meeting of the Cambridge City Council to order. The purpose of today's meeting is to discuss The City of Cambridge's ongoing and future work in using artificial intelligence to improve services, including comparative examples while ensuring any AI use aligns with city values complies with legal and privacy requirements, and benefits both employees and the public. The first order of business is a roll call of members present

Al-Zubi, absent. Vice Mayor Azeem?

Present.

Present. Councilor Flaherty? Absent. Councilman McGovern? Present Present. Councillor Nolan? Simmons, Sperino-Wheeler, Zusy, Mayor Siddiqui. That's five members present and four recorded as absent.

Per Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, adopted by the Massachusetts General Court and approved by the Governor, the city is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge City Council. You can also view the meeting via the City's Open Meeting Portal or on the city's cable channel 22. There will be no public comment today. If members of the public would like to submit written communications, they can email them So with that, the order of business will be I'll have some brief opening remarks and then I'll pass it to the city manager. And then we'll have a presentation from the chief information officer and then we'll go from there so and then as we get discussion I'll lay some kind of ground rules on how to do that discussion. But I want to thank everyone for joining today. I know it's been a busy week, so I appreciate everyone being here.

We know that AI is rapidly changing how we live, work and Thank you very much. It already is. The question before us how we can use these tools to better serve our residents. Cambridge is uniquely positioned to have this conversation. We're home to world-class universities, groundbreaking research Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much.

A lot of cities actively using AI and we'll see how even in our local government, I think today's discussion will get a lot of information to think about. I encourage the City Council to really ask as many questions and to really think about how we're thinking about the use of AI. So with that I'll pass it to the city manager.

Thank you so much, Mayor Siddiqui. Should we do quick introductions? So maybe we'll just go around, but I'm Ian, I'm the city manager.

Jay Fosco, Chief Information Officer. Jean McCursey, Chief of Strategy.

Benner, Assistant City Manager for Fiscal.

Pardis Safari, Director of Economic Opportunity Development at CDD.

Sambal Siddiqui, Mayor.

Evans Plonsky, Legislative Aid to the Mayor. McGovern, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, Matt Witalik. I'm a summer fellow in the city manager office.

Thanks so much, and just want to say thank you especially to Matt who has done a lot of pulling much of this together in coordinating efforts across the city over the summer. So we've been really grateful for I think we've provided just a quick executive summary but we'll kind of move straight into the content. I really think this is an important conversation for us all to start, it's something that we have brushed alongside of during many city council meetings and this is an area where Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you so much for having me. where there are a lot of fears and concerns over how AI tools are being deployed and the broader implications on society. I think slide three is just an important level setting slide in terms of when we say artificial intelligence, it really does encompass a lot of different underlying technology's Thank you for having me. Thank you. Talk about that broader umbrella.

There are a lot of different types of AI, some of which have been in use for a much longer period of time from machine learning to natural language processing, computer vision robotics and predictive analytics. We'll get into some of this in terms of the use cases, but some of these applications have been in use by the city for some time and we've seen them in a lot and the leading edge large language models, LLMs are kind of where that new use case is coming out but there are many different ways that AI can be deployed. On slide four, we've tried to think about how to organize how we have a discussion and how the city plays a role in this conversation and deployment of AI technology. And just as an initial... Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us. Having this engagement and conversation both with the City Council and with our community is going to be an important step toward and many more. The second big area is how we would actually use artificial intelligence. How do city staff deploy these across departments to serve the community? A lot of these tools are being developed, used, applied in Cambridge. and in fact, that is only going to grow over time.

But even though many of the foundational models are mostly developed in Silicon Valley and San Francisco we are seeing a lot of tech companies make their home here It is going to be a driver of our local economy. and that's also why this conversation is so important for us as a community. But I think this kind of brings together the need for us to actually have more of one integrated conversation about these technologies that are coming out. Slide six, as we get into some of the questions of how we engage with the community. I think we felt as we were having this discussion internally that it was important to acknowledge how many concerns are coming out and how quickly those concerns are increasing.

Even in the last week, we've seen more reporting about public perceptions about data centers. And so we're mostly talking about the tools and how they're applied. Those tools are being powered by an immense growth of data centers around the country and that public sentiment has shifted rapidly from you know 40% of the country having deep concerns about the construction and pace of data centers to I think now 70% of people are saying we don't want a data center in our and our community. And so I think it's acknowledged that technology is moving really quickly but people have these deep concerns about job losses, privacy, the impact on the environment Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

In the next slide on slide seven, we're just showing a small snapshot of the different ways that we are actually already Thank you. has really been on the forefront offering introductions to artificial intelligence, safe AI use, responsible AI use and also helping job seekers use these tools where in today's world A lot of resume screening, unfortunately is being done by algorithms and artificial intelligence. and people need to understand that. And they need to how they can actually use some of these tools to help them find employment. We've hosted conversations and discussions, town halls about how AI is intersecting with society. And we are also offering those same tools to small businesses.

The economic development team has been doing a great job creating forums and also giving people more education about how they can advance their businesses with artificial intelligence. Slide 8 just talks a bit about further opportunities and so the ways that we can use some of these local partnerships. You know, we are home to two world-leading universities and A bunch of companies have already found their presence here and it's growing. And further, there's a lot of resources that are available both from the state and federal government. So these are tools I think we're trying to spread and help people find. So I think there's a whole robust conversation that we're having, and I think especially as larger questions come up, we're excited to think about with the council how we actually engage at a societal level.

And I'll turn this over to Mr. Fusco just to talk through some of how AI is being deployed within the city in different opportunities for us to discuss.

Thank you, Ian. I want to start by saying that there's been a great deal of collaboration across the city and specifically with the mayor's office on how we can utilize Artificial Intelligence within the city, and I thank everyone for their participation to get us here today. But I'd like to take a step back and look at our neighbors in Boston, and we've been collaborating a great deal with them as well. and what they've done, similar to what we're thinking about at this point. So Boston's built an AI literacy through self-paced trainings. Can we just jump into the next slide? I'm sorry. Self-paced training, hands on workshops and even had an added incentive to complete the trainings which would give them access to their Citi AI tools. They've also established governance and guidance with their tool set Similar to what we've rolled out here in Cambridge.

And two examples of what they've actually pursued from a use case perspective is a bid bot tool. which we are beginning to collaborate with them for potential use here at Cambridge. And that's a partnership that they had with Harvard to simplify public procurement and they've also used or created an AI assistant on their main site which started out a little bumpy but it's evolving as the agent learns more. So Boston is one of our peer examples, but there are other cities too with the next slide we'll take a look at and just a broad range of municipal use cases that could potentially we could leverage. For example, just a few. Memphis is using AI technology to identify potholes so they can prioritize their repairs in Charlotte. They've consolidated housing applications from multiple departments into a single process.

And in Pittsburgh, they're upscaling their local workers as an economic development catalyst. So let's talk a little bit about what we're doing here in Cambridge. If you can jump to the next slide.

I just wanted to say, appreciate the mayor's office and Evan for doing some of the research that led to some of these examples.

Thank you.

So we're not starting from scratch. In the city, we rolled out AI guidelines for responsible use and our AI assistant which is co-pilot back in November of 2025. The guidelines are iterative they will be modified as technology advances Microsoft 365 Platform and their Applications Within ITV, we utilize cloud code for our software engineering efforts which has been incredibly useful in rendering tasks that used to take days sometimes weeks into hours and minutes. So the next slide will show How departments here in Cambridge are already producing tangible value from these tools. So AI is being used here in

Communications is using it for AI-assisted translations. IT, as I mentioned before, is using for coding, troubleshooting, technical problem solving and this allows staff to complete work more efficiently and expand project scope Community Development is using AI to reduce the time needed to develop grant applications. And Public Works is using an AI analysis of LIDAR to replace a manual pavement inspection process that cut costs To expand on this AI use, employees need a shared foundation in what AI can do where it fails and how to use it safely. If we go to the next slide, we've been working with a company. It's a not-for-profit Innovate U.S. as part of our FY27 approach.

Innovate U.S. is a non-profit based right here out of the Northeastern University it's public service focused, it's free to government partners and it's proven across many government entities So how will they support us? Thank you very much. So training is the first step in a broader phased approach that we're recommending for FY27. If you could jump to the next slide, you can take a look. So similar to what Boston has done, we want to build AI literacy across the city

What we noticed was when we rolled out Copilot and our guidelines, there were varying levels of understanding with artificial intelligence. And we want to bring everybody up to at least a baseline level so that we can promote baseline intelligence We could have a baseline of responsible artificial intelligence use so folks also feel comfortable using it and then also being able to ask questions. So with that, We also propose to establish an AI decision-making framework or a governance model so that when somebody has an idea on how to utilize AI potentially in their organization, maybe another organization in the city Thank you very much. and eventually possibly even get to a point where it's an ongoing tool that we can utilize within the city.

And with that framework, give folks the ability to identify high-impact potential use cases Thank you very much. I will turn it back over to our city manager to talk a little bit about economic development using artificial intelligence.

And I'll turn it over to Pardeep Safari, our director of economic development.

Thank you, City Manager. So obviously as the City Manager kind of teed up in his introduction, obviously Cambridge has been Bedrock of Innovation here in the U.S., and so obviously we've seen that with life sciences, Thank you so much for joining us. Drug Discovery, Chatbot Creation and other different types of AI models. and some of the companies that you see here on this slide around life sciences are also using AI to help with Some of the work that they do. So kind of as we as a city are thinking about AI and how we can use it to help us, some of these major companies, of course, are thinking

and I think I'll just maybe say on the next slide we're seeing how different parts of the country are enticing AI companies to We have Wisconsin thinking about AI. We're also seeing a lot on workforce development. I think some of that we're seeing at the state level here in Massachusetts, but obviously there's different ways that maybe we could think about it within our current workforce development programs as well as future ones. and then something we're already thinking about is how could we maybe replicate San Jose's model of a government AI coalition conference so that were a part of government AI policy and ethical deployment here in Cambridge as well as across Massachusetts.

So we're definitely trying to work closely with the Mass AI Hub, which is a quasi-state agency working on AI and some of these policies here at the state level.

So I think we wanted to try to keep this pretty brief so we could get the discussion. And yeah, happy to just open it up for questions, discussion.

Thank you. So we have, I think until 3 30 but we don't have to use all that time I will ask my colleagues to start with two questions. AI can, you know, perhaps meaningfully improve services we provide to residents. Any kind of principles you think should guide how We evaluate and use AI. And just your overall thoughts on anything in the presentation. We wanted this to be a little open-ended.

This is kind of our first city presentation on this and so there may be things that you feel like You'll have further questions about and want ongoing information. And so we can continue that, but I think the approach really is... I think best slide as far as kind of How the City's Thinking About It is on page 15 about building AI literacy, establishing this AI decision framework. identifying and piloting high-impact use cases, and then that's all being used to inform the city's long-term AI strategy. That's kind of the roadmap we're on. So open discussion, pleasure of the city council on thoughts that they have. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler?

I could start with one which is on, you know, specific use cases that you could talk about thinking through. I'd preface it with, this is just like such a broad conversation and I guess good to start somewhere, but it's almost hard to have because there's so many different potential things you could think about using this for and what actually it will be useful for versus not. Who knows at this point? It's a little like, to me I mean, to the general public and folks who we represent, a little self-driving cars or lab-grown meat where like Could this theoretically transform land use in the U.S., where 80% of it goes to producing meat? Could it reshape transportation radically and everybody has a self-driving car? Like, yeah, it could. Is it something that folks have actually seen impact their daily life right now? I think for the most folks, no. Like maybe they've played around with chat GPT a little bit or clot or something and They've seen it do some cool images. They've done a travel itinerary. Has that really changed anyone's day-to-day life at this point? I think for most folks, no. They hear about in the news all the time.

They see the wild valuations of these companies. Have they actually seen it change their life in a meaningful way? No. and it's a thing where if we do start using it and do it in a way that is helpful, I think most folks could be okay with that. do it in the wrong way and it screws up, like it is very noticeable. People don't like AI slot, people don't the hallucinations of it. The hallucinations actually can be quite harmful and confusing and it's really unclear how prevalent that even is So I think the examples here were helpful. I think it's interesting to think about the different ways they are. We've had counselors throw out different ways that can be used I don't know, some of the counselors suggested like it can be used to rewrite our zoning code or do planning or things. And I have no idea if any of that is possible or useful and actually don't want dive into having AI rewrite our zoning code tomorrow. So the thing I think I'm actually most interested in hearing about is what... Specific applications are you thinking of?

And especially what would be public facing? What are you, what are you Thinking about using AI for if we do start rolling AI out in a public-facing way, what would be the first thing the public sees?

I think a lot of what you have expressed feels right. I agree, like a dynamic where sometimes when we ask this question of how do we use AI within the city? It's sort of like a tool looking for a problem. And so, you know a lot of I think what we want to do is be looking at other places. What they've done well and where AI has been deployed and it's been effective We've certainly also seen AI get deployed in ways that have been pretty harmful and ineffective. And so I think that'll probably guide some of this I'd say just on some of those concrete examples that you gave, our initial conversations with different AI startups or companies that are Thank you for having me.

It is actually very easy given that a lot of these large language models already have access to the whole internet. Thank you for having me. It's very easy for them to hallucinate or to miss some detail that if you talked to somebody in a department, they would say oh no that's not right. and I think that's actually where you know, I'd say we're looking for those high impact use cases where they will probably be a little bit narrower because it actually does take a lot of work to To get a model from 80% good, where like 20% of the time it's making sort of unacceptable errors to what the real expectation is, which is often like 99% good.

and I think that's where we want to find these narrower use cases. I think we want and where there is going to be real benefit. So I think we're still exploring, but that's probably the next steps that will be trying to find a list of examples that we can then say, Do any of these really make a lot of sense and how do we start doing that work?

And I'll just add, Councilor, I think you're absolutely right in that there's this external piece like Waymo and VAT. Thank you so much for joining us. Doing something with AI on permitting. And we have in this presentation just some of what the city's using it for, whether that's the grant applications to the... There's payment condition inventory. I think the question is, what is the challenge that we have and what kind of problems are we trying to solve? And I do think our departments will have various ideas.

So I think that's why there's this decision framework that you all, your chief information officer, you're thinking about on how the city actually gets that done.

Thank you, Barry. Yes. As far as the decision-making framework is concerned, it's really a way for someone that has an idea on how to use or to use artificial intelligence within the city can then I start here. This is the first step I can take and then there's a governance process throughout to answer any questions, to maybe even have gates where you understand if the technology is useful and might be rolled back but also a way for it to be synthesized and eventually rolled out for use. I think there's a bit of a misconception, I think, out in the public in terms of Thank you very much.

I think what's really important is that if you point an AI agent or assistant to bad data, you're increasing the chances of getting bad data back or hallucinations back or not updated data back exponentially. So I think with artificial intelligence rollout, education is fantastic and I think that's our first step in but when we get to the point where we're going to Thank you. That could be part of the decision-making framework. It could be, okay, is your data prepared? Is your data clean? Is it up to date? Is this source of the truth? Having all that

Those types of guardrails and potential decision-making points is critical as we move forward.

Thank you, that's helpful. I think that's all I had for now.

Govan.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, through you. I don't really have... I mean, I do have questions. I can't really wrap my head around them right now in the moment. Thank Exciting but slightly scary conversation to have. I'm sort of looking at the list of constituent concerns and you left off world dominance, AI. I feel like I'm at the I'm definitely interested in How this conversation rolls out and how we think about Thank you very much.

Interested in the, you know, the economic development piece. I mean, I sort of thinking back to when we watched the play about the DNA research, it sort of feels like that, you Thank you for joining us. invite this type of technology and economic development into their communities. As we see Kendall Square, some of the labs and certainly the office starting to struggle. What is that next frontier that we should be exploring as a cutting-edge city? It's a really important conversation as to where we're going to go in the future of our economic security.

But it is, you know, as we all have seen in the news and things There are some scary parts to it And certainly as more and more of the people in charge You're getting fewer and fewer Thank you very much. It does raise a lot of red flags and concerns. Thank you very much. The educational piece that you're doing, and I probably should take some of those opportunities myself to learn more about it because we do hear a lot more in not just in this chamber but around people using AI to

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm not sure we always do that. So, I think the education piece is really valuable and important. Thank you. I have Vice Mayor Azeem. Thank you so much.

I know the mayor and I had a preview of this conversation and some conversations with staff before this in preparation, so I won't go into too much depth. I just wanted to synthesize a few thoughts from my side. One is that I think we should stay away from public-facing uses for as long as we can unless it's something very verified and so You know, like I think that that is the place where it's the most cautious and I think the public likes talking to people and feeling like they can 100% trust the information. And there's a general apprehension to AI for those sorts of use cases where it feels like you want a warm personal interaction. and so I would stay away from those cases. My suggestions a little bit are kind of that It might be, you know, I think that there's third-party suppliers that we can work with, you Technique or whatever doesn't really matter. It's more of like we're buying a product and do we like the product?

I think for internal use, my biggest suggestion is I think that we should just get a few pro accounts and let people try it I think that it's a very different experience than the free or the $20 models that you get. And so, for example, one thing that I was thinking through is that like for the multifamily housing conversation, it was really helpful that we had A website that went through all the different meetings we had and what the summaries of each meeting was. And same thing for like whenever you do bike lane installations, we have those websites generated with all the documents and all the history. I think that if you think about AI as like taking jobs or those sorts of concerns, it's very, very negative. I think if you're thinking about it as helping you with the most annoying part of your job, I think at that specific use case is a lot more positive and I would say that we should be very clear as we are, that like you know we're not talking about layoffs or any sorts of things. It's mostly to help you with the most annoying part of your job

and so one like specific use case I think is beneficial to the very top tier subscription models. For example, I was thinking of I asked this morning just in terms of preparation of like, hey, we've had a lot of meetings now on ShotSpotter. Could you take all the summary of the meetings from years ago to the recent city council meetings and just generate a webpage? Thank you for joining us. and in 20 minutes it was just able to generate a website with all the documentation. And I think that those are the sorts of use cases where I imagine it's more helpful is like tedious work and so you know I think the summary of my suggestions is that I would say at this point for internal use where we're not buying a vendor or going with a product I would just try it out in small ways buy a couple subscriptions let people play around with it and see how we like

Small-scale experiments would be really helpful.

Thanks Vice Mayor and just to your point I think there's, I know that the state has used is had launched I think chat GPT across their Executive Branch. I don't know how Co-pilot kind of comes with Microsoft and what we're doing. Is it correct that the city, they have paid tools so you've used quad code What are the other paid things that we're using?

Thank you. At this point, the and many more. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. and to our communications team to play with it. And we in IT have that as well.

It could be such that a year from now or maybe even six months from now We moved the entire city to the paid version. And the benefits you get for that is just a complete integration with the platform, 365 platform. So it's not a lot of copy and pasting You know, trying to understand from one application to the tool back and forth. It's all integrated and it makes things much more efficient and simple.

I want to play with it too, if you want to send it over. Okay any other points of view? Councilor Simmons

So this conversation is primarily being formed about how the city interacts or works with AI. Is that correct?

So I couldn't hear you. It's a little soft if you could lean into the microphone, please.

This conversation is primarily about how the municipality uses AI. Is that correct?

Through you, Mayor. I think that is probably the most interesting piece of the conversation how the city is actually using AI to deliver for our community but I think we wanted to acknowledge that Thank you so much for joining us. Given all of these concerns, how we are then using AI and how AI is affecting society. And that's the community engagement piece. We aren't having this conversation in isolation. Some of the leading applications of AI and the companies that are developing these models and the academics that are opining on this all are in our community

I think there is a larger conversation in the fall as we're getting into the next budget cycle about the economics of the city, about office and lab vacancy and commercial growth. And I think you're giving me an interesting face, Councilor Simmons. But I would say when we are having conversations and perhaps can speak more to this if there are questions but I'd say the growth of the commercial sector Thank you so much for having me. in Office and Lab. When we look at San Francisco, they filled more than a million square feet worth of office and lab over the last three months. over the last three months. And so there's been enormous economic growth coming in that area, we haven't seen that Simmons. Thank you.

I kind of wanted a snack and you kind of gave me a meal, but that's okay. Where I was going recently, I was asking if we're going to be – because we have to, I guess, fully embrace AI, through the lens of community engagement. And so for me, it's how are we going to include low and moderate income folks? Black and Hispanic residents in local government even as we have this conversation Thank you very much. The community. And that's particularly important because we've had so much conversation about municipal broadband and how Thank you very much.

Those that are least represented in terms of the knowledge base around AI, I kept abreast. How do we keep them up? Do we set up – I mean, we have free Wi-Fi and we have computer labs. But do we offer basic AI literacy and digital literacy? This would be the time to do it. If the city is launching its conversation around AI and technology, our library's going to start doing basic... And they may already... We want to do it in multiple languages. Translate digital civic tools into Spanish and other languages. And then I guess what's also important is auditing local data sets to make sure they represent all neighborhoods equally. That's going to be really important, so I'm going to say it again. Audit local data sets to make sure they represent all neighborhoods equally.

Fix those gaps where minority and low-income areas are undermapped or ignored and involve local residents. And this is really important, involving local residents in the decision or deciding what data the city collects and uses. Can we have a co-design model with our communities? Partnering with grassroots Groups that are led by people of color to build those AI tools. And I don't want to get too far down, but I'll give you so much that you feel overwhelmed. But for me, I just think it's important that we have that conversation about equity and access at the very beginning. Internally what the city does with the employees do but also externally In terms of the communities, because the further we get using AI and the less we reach back and get the community, the further behind they're going to fall. I yield.

I do agree. I want to mention earlier this week we went to the Celebrating National Black Business Month and there is an upcoming workshop around some of Some piece of this, but Pardis do you want to share more?

Sure, through you, Mayor Siddiqui. So a couple of efforts through the Economic Opportunity Development Division have been how we're educating small business owners around AI specifically on our supplier diversity efforts so that folks know they can use some AI tools around responding to bids. Thank you for joining us today. August 12th at the First Street Market, specifically around using AI for contracting purposes. And I think I'll just say two other things on the education. One is, the library has been doing some educational AI training As well as the state did launch earlier this year with Google free AI, Google training.

And so I think some of the conversations we've all been having is how do we ensure that residents and others know about some of those free Simmons.

Thank you. One other question and maybe it's to you, Fusco? Okay thank you Mr. When we talk about AI, you know, AI is us sort of computerized. That's how I think of it and because we have biases, I expect that AI is going to have those and so let's talk about facial recognition technology because that model is trained on lighter skin Thank you very much. I mean, I know AI exists. We're trying to build our city-wide model, correct? Am I wrong? If I'm swimming in the wrong pond, I want to know. Okay. You're okay, Councilor Simmons. That's all right.

I just want us to be mindful of the inherent discrimination in AI because of what it is, where it gets its information from. We spent a lot of time, we still do, in the council talking about surveillance technology. Not that AI isn't surveillance technology, but isn't it a surveillance technology? So if we're going to use technology, may come up, and some of them we are going to know. We can use AI to figure them out, but the other ones we're going to learn by doing. And so I would love to see in our rolling out of our age AI Portfolio that we pay particular attention to bias, discrimination, outreach and engagement. I yield Madam Mayor.

Thank you very much. and we established an AI working group as well. And we are very cognizant of the misinformation or the potential bias that AI can produce, and that's why when we say responsible use We always, at the end of our conversation we are responsible for the output that we produce whether it's using AI or not because we all know All artificial intelligence is a machine that's learning based on data that's input into it, which could be biased. There could be misinformation. There is. It's legitimate.

responsible use where the person that's using the artificial intelligence assistant needs to review, and if they identify that bias, they need to correct it.

Thank you. Let's go through you, Madam Mayor. Just one question. Did you mention – did you say working group?

Yes, we established an AI working group. where really at this point it's been a form for how artificial intelligence is being used within the city. We have a very diverse group of folks from different departments within the Everything from how we can use artificial intelligence to simplify our everyday work, to the Vice Mayor's point about simplifying mundane tasks. All the way to what could we do in our responsibilities to help mitigate in any way we can the negative impacts on the environment.

When you say it's a diverse working group, what does diversity mean to you? And what I mean by that is I look at ethnicity, gender, income, class of where Employment Hierarchy. There's someone from the city manager's office, but is there someone that actually loads the trash on the trash truck?

So the folks that are on the committee, in the working group were recommended to us by different department heads as as representatives that would work with the AI Working Group to help roll out artificial intelligence in a responsible way.

So through you, Madam Mayor, and then I'll yield the floor, I'm going to push back and ask of you Thank you. Black, Latino, someone that is moderately income to the head of department. Because those voices are going to all bring something different. Simmons, who I would be asked might be very differently than the city manager because he works with a different group of people. You follow what I'm saying? So for me it'd be important, you know, I want to see their faces, I So that I can trust that as they're rolling this out for us, it's going to be as representative as possible. The next meeting you have, you should ask yourselves, who's not in the – who's

Thank you, Councilor Simmons. Councilmember Govan?

And maybe for this working group and maybe we need the mayor or someone from the mayor's office to make sure that connection with the council You know, it's consistent. It might be worth not to give you another job, Madam Mayor.

And a young person.

I'm young.

Younger. They're all younger than us. And how am I supposed to take that?

You know, I think Councilor Simmons you make a really good point about these pilot projects and kind of the Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. This is all in everyone's minds. One thing I was wondering if you could share would be As we think about more tools for city staff, just how city staff so far has reacted to Copilot, for example. Because I know it's been a little mixed. You know, I did my own kind of, hey, who's using Copilot?

and I'm really curious from even the count my colleagues on the council like if Any of you are using Copilot, or if you know what that is. It doesn't look like you are. Councilor McGovern isn't, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler isn't. And so I am curious, I do think maybe there are staff who are like, In the same boat here, why do we use it? How helpful is it? And I... I have been using it, but it was a learning curve for me too. And I know the city's done trainings, but if you could spend a few minutes just talking about how you're thinking about that approach.

So, the feedback that we've had on Copilot, to your point, Mayor, is mixed. Some folks love it. They think it's great. It really helps them with their day-to-day work. and others that use other AI assistants think it's the bottom of the barrel and Gemini is better or Claude is better, everything is better. I think though the lion's share of folks that are using the co-pilot AI assistant find it useful for what they are using it for. To be honest, what we've heard in the working group are very simple applications. I need to summarize a document. I know my email should sound warmer, maybe a different tone. So very simple use cases of what we heard the majority of people using it for.

But in terms of making a change or anything like that, maybe if we go to the paid version for everyone to see how maybe our staff reacts to the use of the paid version of Microsoft Copilot embedded and integrated into the Microsoft 365 platform, which we have here. as opposed to potentially moving to a different tool. However, from what I've heard in the working group and across the city everyone's open to a change if that's what folks agree would be best for the city

Vice Mayor Azeem has his hand raised.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I will say as someone who uses a lot of different tools, I don't use Copilot. I feel like it's not the most effective of the tools and I just wanted to add that I think that we should think of it kind of like Spreadsheets or like Google Docs or like Canva or something, which is like it doesn't make sense for the goal to be 100% usage or even most employees using it. I think that like It can feel like, oh, it's a new technology. We have to get everyone to adapt with the times or something. And I just wanted to reiterate that I think my feeling is it'll be useful for maybe 10% of staff, but hopefully it's pretty useful for some subset of that 10%. and so like you know I don't think that we have to try to like but you know jerry-rig this into everyone's job nor is that necessarily even a good outcome that increases productivity and doesn't leave people frustrated right. We have a wide range of jobs, so just wanted to make that small point

Any other thoughts? Comments? We don't have everyone on the council today, so I'm sure my other colleagues definitely have thoughts, but we'll try to also reach out to them. See if there's anything that they want to share on this topic. So go ahead.

Through you, Mayor Siddiqui, I think this is just the first conversation, so I think it's kind of – I think collectively, some of the conversation is going to be I would agree with Vice Mayor Azeem. You know, Thank you for having me. Thank you very much.

or certainly some work that we otherwise wouldn't do and I think that's actually the part about the technology that feels most compelling, that there is actually work would not have been done because it would be too labor intensive or too difficult that AI can help us do Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for watching! and I think to this discussion and to ensure that we're aligning with the city council and that we are being transparent with the community, it is to say we are willing to move forward.

And that we want to start experimenting and that we wanna also make sure, and maybe it is the case that we want to set up a more regular cadence of conversations in public discussions about how trying this out and how is it going? Because some of the conversations I have just personally Some people say, like I will never touch AI and I don't want it to be used. And so I think explaining the cases where this can be beneficial in generating some level of community awareness and buy-in that we are going to be using public resources to serve the community and use these tools is an important first step. And I think I do hear that from the council, that there is a concern over how we use these tools and that we do it responsibly. But also that as

The place where all of this technology is sitting, that we should be doing some of this work and that there is actually promise here.

Yeah, and I think I'll just add, I mean, I think on the council level there's some of our colleagues. We passed something on Monday that said you know let's Explore AI in this, you know, traffic enforcement. Right? And so I think as we think for me personally, you and it really encouraged folks to think about how we're improving resident services. And that's something I'm really interested in, in addition to where we can remove these barriers for staff and we're you know I think how can these tools help us deliver better public services is something I'm curious about and I think Some city staff are already thinking along those lines, whether it's permitting or other areas. But of course we have to ensure the right guardrails are there

around a lot of what you all have mentioned in terms of bias, privacy, security, transparency, human oversight. So there's a lot more On this, and as the city manager mentioned, this is kind of the beginning of the conversation. I'm excited to continue that, and I appreciate the council's Willingness to weigh in on this topic. So we do have to place this communication on file, so we'll go ahead on a motion by Councilor McGovern, do a roll call on placing this communication

Al-Zubi, absent, Vice Mayor Azeem. Yes. Yes, Councilor Flaherty, absent. Councilor McGovern? Yes. Yes, Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler? Yes. Yes, Councillor Zusy is absent. Mayor Siddiqui? Yes Yes, that's five members voting affirmative four recorded as absent

The communication with other city officers is placed on file. Thank you all for joining. You have an hour-ish, less than an hour back but almost an hour Thank you everyone who worked on putting this together. On a motion by Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler to adjourn, we'll do a roll call.

Yes, Councilor Flaherty absent. Councilor McGovern? Yes. Yes, Councillor Nolan absent. Councillor Simmons? Yes, yes. Yes. We're adjourned. Goodbye.

Thanks for watching!