Chatbot assistants for all San Jose city employees?
Indeed, the high-tech trend may soon be coming to City Hall as San Jose leaders want to expand AI use to boost productivity throughout the workforce by using a tool that would allow all of its 7,000 employees to create their own chatbot assistants.
San Jose’s latest foray into virtual agents builds on gains the city’s made with its multiple successful artificial intelligence pilots and programs aimed at enhancing employees’ skills.
The city has solicited proposals for a generative AI platform that would allow employees to reduce some repetitive and administrative aspects of their jobs — such as writing reports, analyzing data, summarizing documents and supporting software development — and instead focus on “higher order tasks.”
“I think generative AI offers the possibility of automating some of the most routine and time-consuming elements of the job, which we’ve already seen documented evidence of employees and multiple departments becoming 10-20% more productive,” San José Mayor Matt Mahan said in an interview with The Mercury News.
Over the past few years, San José has sought to become a leading authority in using AI for government functions to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
In 2023, the city tested a bus route tool that reduces the time spent at red lights and keeps public transit on schedule. It also uses AI to improve language translation on government web pages and proactively identify potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, and homeless encampments, allowing it to deliver services before receiving a service request. More recently, the city announced it would expand its road safety pilot program after successfully identifying potholes and trash debris with 97% and 88% accuracy, respectively, and launch a program to speed up permitting times.
Along with helping to found the GovAI Coalition — a group of local, state and federal entities that shares strategies and solutions — the city has created multi-track curricula with San José State to teach its employees how to use AI tools.
Stephen Liang, a data analyst in the city’s Information Technology Department, is definitely a fan.
He said the AI assistant he built during the city’s initial training program has completely changed how he manages 311 service request data, allowing him to focus on more complex problems. He added that the combination of tools will allow employees to serve residents better.
“As part of this, I developed the 311 Service Request Analyzer, which quickly identifies the top 10 issues residents are submitting,” Liang said. “What used to take hours — or even an entire day, depending on the number of requests — now takes just minutes. That speed means we can respond faster, spot trends earlier, and ensure our resources are directed where they’re needed most.”
Through the first two cohorts of the city’s initiative to help employees improve their skills, Mahan said about 80 employees completed the courses, documenting savings of more than 10,000 hours of staff time and roughly $50,000 in consulting costs by using AI applications throughout many city departments.
For example, an environmental inspector created a GPT that could read over 700 pages of code documents in seconds. Mahan’s budget team also used AI to spot spending and revenue trends and provide insight by querying past financial records.
An employee in the city’s Department of Transportation used AI to apply for a federal grant for electric vehicle charging stations. Though the Trump Administration pulled the grant, the AI program built allowed the city to pivot and successfully apply for a multi-million dollar funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
But while the endgame is to improve productivity, Mahan acknowledged that AI use is not foolproof, as evidenced by the number of high-profile AI “hallucinations” — incorrect or misleading outputs produced.
For example, earlier this year, a “Make America Healthy Again” report released by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy included multiple non-existent citations likely resulting from AI.
Generative AI also led to an increase in attorney discipline proceedings due to the submission of court documents referencing fake case law.
More locally, a civic AI platform appearing in the Google news feed produced content from a segment of a recent San Jose City Council meeting that referred to Mahan as “Mayor Sam Liccardo.”
“We have to train our staff to go back to the original source and do verifications and check things,” Mahan said. “With every source, you have to be particularly on top of it. I think using a (large language model) does not give you permission to turn your brain off, and you have to be just as curious and inquiring using an LLM as you might be with a Google search. It’s not like we aren’t already using technology to gather and process information more quickly than we used to.”
Despite city officials’ desire to lean more into AI, some concerns linger among city staffers.
John Tucker, a representative from American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 101, which represents thousands of the city’s workforce, said Mahan has not spoken to the union or frontline workers.
Tucker added that AI use would be a focal point of upcoming contract negotiations and workers will demand “strong guardrails to ensure new technology strengthens public services and respects the people who provide them.”
“We support technology that helps us serve the public better, tools that make our jobs safer, faster, or more effective,” Tucker said. “But replacing people with algorithms is the opposite of getting ‘back to basics.’ Residents rely on the human judgment and experience of city workers to keep San José running. AI should support that work, not hollow it out.”
Mahan has repeatedly stressed that the use of AI is not to replace workers, and that it should be viewed as an investment.
“We are helping our people gain access to and train with the best tools on the market,” Mahan said. “We recognize that generative AI is here to stay and only going to grow in importance and is likely to literally shape the nature of work for the next generation and beyond. We want to equip our workforce to be on the cutting edge of that trend for their sake and our residents.”