Inside the toolkit: Municipal AI Adoption

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can be a helpful tool for your municipality. Across Alberta, administrations and councils are expected to do more with less (we’ll dive more into this next week when we discuss our taxation toolkit, Property Assessment and Taxation: A Guide for Alberta’s Municipal Leaders). 

AI isn’t for replacing staff. It can’t do what a person can do. But it can help your staff focus on serving residents and the community. This toolkit serves as a guide to getting started with AI in your community and includes considerations and guardrails. 

The toolkit is useful for municipal staff and elected officials who want to start or are trying to decide if they want to start using AI. The guide is straightforward enough for complete beginners and robust enough to get an AI plan launched. 

Get started with a plain-language introduction to AI. There are different types of AI and different brands of AI, so getting the basic terminology straight is essential to the process. Our list of key terms might be overwhelming if you’re just getting started, so we recommend flagging page 5 so you can reference it quickly. 

On page 6, we invite you to consider how your municipality can use AI and follow it with several case studies of real municipalities who are successfully using AI. Consider which case studies represent solutions that could fit in your municipality. The next sections describe some of the technical details for working with AI. Even if you don’t think your municipality is ready to implement AI, these sections give you important background for understanding how AI works in general and how it could work for you. 

Once you have the basics, read about security and guardrails. Remember, Alberta’s Protection of Privacy Act (POPA), Access to Information Act (ATIA), and your municipal policies still apply when using AI. 

Ready? 

Using AI is really intuitive. At its core, you just ask it a question and it gets you an answer. But to use it strategically (and safely), you’re going to want a plan. Our toolkit suggests a 12-month roadmap before offering eight tasks you can use to get started without overwhelming yourself. 

Find the toolkit here!