Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping policy conversations—sparking debates on ethics, equity, and responsible use while promising transformative applications as technology rapidly expands. Likewise, generative artificial intelligence (genAI), which trains on large-scale data to produce new content like text and images, increasingly presents opportunities for the public sector to improve government functioning and public services. However, local governments may not know where to begin in deploying AI tools.

This report explores ways local governments and supporting organizations are implementing AI and identifying opportunities for continued AI use for operational and policy needs while accounting for risk mitigation. Drawing on qualitative interviews with experts in the government AI sector and local government leaders as well as a literature review, we find the following:

• Many local governments are exploring and experimenting with genAI. A growing network of town, city, and county government leaders and supporting organizations are developing and sharing AI use policies and strategizing on promising AI use cases.
• Opportunities for local government use of genAI generally fall into three tiers of use cases:
  • Tier 1: Digital assistants. These are AI applications that help automate routine tasks, such as summarizing meeting notes or drafting content such as job descriptions. These applications rely on receiving specific prompts to generate responses and may be fully internal facing to government.
  • Tier 2: Constituent communications. These are applications that support functions such as language translation of government materials or chatbots that answer frequently asked questions.
  • Tier 3: Complex problem solving. These are applications that support problem-solving on large-scale government challenges. For example, genAI could be used to help improve access to public benefits by synthesizing benefits eligibility rules and scanning applications to confirm they contain all requisite information.
• Most of the local government use of genAI that we observed fell into tier 1. This is motivated by staffing shortages that drive the need for efficiency gains and the view that these applications are safer testing grounds for AI technologies. Governments may lack the capacity and specific AI knowledge to apply the current generation of genAI tools for tier 3 challenges while mitigating serious risks.

Opportunities for governments, research and technical assistance organizations, and funders to support responsible AI deployment include the following:

• The federal government could convene an AI technical assistance corps to support local governments in their AI adoption, particularly for more public-facing tier 2 and 3 applications. Philanthropy could fund seasoned civic technology organizations to develop and socialize AI training resources.
• Research organizations can support local governments in vetting AI tools for quality, security, and equity considerations, and develop trusted use cases for these tools. They can also help governments assess their readiness to implement AI.
• As local governments build up their AI expertise, they can develop and share guidelines, use policies, and templates to amplify best practices. These should be informed by thoughtful community engagement to ensure AI tools are responsive to community needs. The resource list below can help local governments explore AI use.