The rapid advancement of generative AI (genAI) technology has spurred considerable enthusiasm and uncertainty across local governments. GenAI’s user-friendliness and broad applicability could offer an unprecedented boost to local government productivity in the face of significant capacity constraints and help solve complex government problems to improve residents’ quality of life. Despite this optimism, genAI adoption in local governments remains primarily exploratory and focused on internal-facing digital assistant applications due to lower barriers to adoption and oversight. Our research identifies recommendations for ways in which technology companies and philanthropies can help remove barriers to adoption of higher-tier—and higher-impact—genAI.

Tech companies and philanthropies can provide critical financial and in-kind (technology and expert staff) support for higher-tier genAI use by local governments in various ways:

• Corporate technology leaders and philanthropies can complement ongoing broad training efforts by making their own expert staff available to governments as advisors providing the deep capacity support required for higher-tier applications.
• Tech companies and philanthropic leaders can enable local governments to partner with subject matter experts in civil society to design and implement policy context-relevant testing of higher-tier genAI use cases and disseminate successful use cases and lessons learned across the local government ecosystem.
• Technology organizations can invest in developing genAI tools that facilitate deployment within government computing environments and generate trust because they are tailored to government security, privacy, and compliance requirements.