There's a bandwagon rolling through every industry right now, and it's painted with the letters A-I. Everyone's jumping on. Few are asking where it's going.
Here's what I've learned from actually deploying AI in municipal government: it amplifies what you already produce. That's it. That's the whole thing.
If your processes are broken, AI will break them faster and at scale. If your documentation is poor, AI will confidently serve that poor documentation to more people. If your team doesn't understand the problem, AI won't understand it either.
The real work still has to be done by people. You still need someone who understands the workflows. Someone who's mapped the edge cases. Someone who knows why things are the way they are before trying to change them.
AI is a force multiplier. But force times zero is still zero.
I built Jacky, a conversational AI serving 140,000 residents of Midland. It works because I spent months understanding every workflow, every exception, every reason why residents call City Hall. The AI came last - after the hard human work was done.
So when vendors tell you AI will transform your organization, ask them: transform it into what? If you don't have a clear answer, you're not ready for AI. You're ready for process improvement. And that's not as sexy to sell.
The good news? Once you've done the work, AI becomes genuinely powerful. But not before.