{"id":249883,"date":"2026-07-23T01:02:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T01:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/249883\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T01:02:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T01:02:18","slug":"pittsburgh-is-showing-smaller-governments-how-to-use-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/249883\/","title":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh Is Showing Smaller Governments How to Use AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI is increasingly a tool of local government<\/a> \u2014 but uptake may be slow across Allegheny County suburbs as local officials try to determine how this evolving technology might streamline the task of governance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have so many local governments \u2026 that don\u2019t have the capacity,\u201d said Joy Ruff, executive director of Local Government Academy<\/a>, an independent nonprofit. \u201cThey\u2019re underresourced. There\u2019s no plug and play right now. And so there\u2019s a real need for local governments to acknowledge that it\u2019s out there and then to come up with policies that govern it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh\u2019s rich tech sector is pushing the city and Allegheny County ahead of the curve to adopt the technology, but some of the county\u2019s 129 other municipalities don\u2019t yet have policies regulating their use of the technology, and some confirm that they don\u2019t yet have the guidance they need to safely use artificial intelligence tools.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Andrew Hayhurst, senior manager of innovation for the the City of Pittsburgh, shows how he is using the AI chatbot Microsoft Copilot to to review, update and modernize a job description to meet the current needs for the role, on July 8, in his office at the City-County Building in Downtown. <\/p>\n

(Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

Dwight Boddorf, borough manager for Tarentum, said that AI can be \u201ctremendously helpful\u201d for a small borough with limited staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmaller communities are often expected to provide the same level of communication, compliance, documentation and service as larger governments, but with far fewer staff. AI can help make us more efficient, but only if it is used with safeguards,\u201d said Boddorf. He said he may use AI to review the borough website and flag potential ADA compliance issues or to compare permit forms with updated ordinances. He also praised the City of Pittsburgh for being \u201cproactive\u201d in discussing AI guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A statewide survey of government officials in Pennsylvania conducted in May and June indicated that 81% of respondents have no Generative AI policy at all, of which 62% agreed it would be valuable to have one.<\/p>\n

A team at the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security conducted the survey via the Local Government Academy to determine how many local leaders, especially in Southwestern Pennsylvania, were thinking about responsible AI use. Respondents were from predominantly smaller municipalities outside the city, with most serving populations between 5,000 and 10,000 residents.<\/p>\n

Beth Schwanke, executive director of Pitt Cyber, said that concerns about data privacy, lack of human connection, confidentiality, bias and legal implications came up in open-ended responses from survey respondents.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of places don\u2019t have any guidance right now, or are even actively telling employees not to use AI, which I don\u2019t think is a very effective tactic and frankly probably counterproductive,\u201d said Schwanke, who is advising some local leaders on how to implement AI responsibly so as not to put residents at risk.<\/p>\n

Small Towns Consider Big Tech
Allegheny County has the second most municipalities of any county<\/a> in the United States after Cook County, Illinois. This makes the role of local government especially central in this region.<\/p>\n

An Lewis, executive director of Steel Rivers Council of Governments, which aims to support municipalities in the Mon Valley, agreed with Boddorf that AI could make the lives of some local government officials easier. Yet she said that since it\u2019s such a new technology and many officials have no knowledge of how it works, not everyone is adopting it at a rapid rate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wheels of government tend to turn slower, even local governments,\u201d said Lewis. She said most of her colleagues in the Mon Valley are probably using AI to a limited extent, but that it feels \u201cforeign\u201d because it\u2019s a new technology.<\/p>\n

Scott Craighead, manager of Elizabeth Township, said that while his small township didn\u2019t have an AI policy in place he was curious to see what other similar sized governments might be doing.<\/p>\n

Ryan Delaney, council president of Plum Borough, said that as of right now Plum does not have any official AI guidelines. He said the topic was brought up recently in a staff meeting because a lot of other governments are looking at it. He said he and his colleagues are taking the time to \u201cget it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Delaney said he views AI as \u201ca tool but not the product.\u201d He also emphasized human review, claiming \u201cwe have to keep demanding that human element.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schwanke said that while AI can be helpful in governance, officials must be ready to train their employees and have the right guidelines in place to protect their residents. She also wants to make sure there\u2019s \u201croom for experimentation and innovation,\u201d with transparency toward residents on how AI is being employed.<\/p>\n

To her, transparency looks like deciding to publish use cases or having an AI registry where county residents can know what AI is doing and how it impacts them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should as someone in government have a higher burden, have a higher level of responsibility toward your residents,\u201d said Schwanke.<\/p>\n

The City Provides Training to Smaller Municipalities and Boroughs
Crafting AI guidelines has been crucial to the work of Chris Belasco, chief data officer for the City of Pittsburgh, and Andrew Hayhurst, the city\u2019s senior manager of innovation. They\u2019ve shared their insights with other local municipalities through their Local Government Academy webinar<\/a>. The webinar aimed to provide a framework for other municipalities to use AI responsibly instead of delaying adoption.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Andrew Hayhurst, left, senior manager of innovation for the the City of Pittsburgh, and Chris Belasco, chief data officer for the city, stand for a portrait in the offices of the city\u2019s Innovation Team on July 8, at the City-County Building in Downtown. The two have been developing AI guidelines and sharing their insights with other local municipalities. <\/p>\n

(Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

Boddorf said the webinar \u201chelped frame AI as a governance issue, not just a technology issue.\u201d He said it reinforced many of the themes from the State of Pennsylvania\u2019s AI pilot program using ChatGPT Enterprise and the related report<\/a> the state issued last year.<\/p>\n

Lewis pointed to the webinar as a resource she encourages her colleagues in the Mon Valley to use when thinking about how to incorporate AI into their work. She said it\u2019s the only training opportunity she\u2019s seen so far for local governments in the region to learn more about AI. She explained that the trainings are specifically designed for Southwestern Pennsylvania where lots of small local governments formed along the rivers with the growth of the steel industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat post-industrial legacy really plays out a lot in our cultures and in the needs and the challenges that our local governments face that are different from some of the places in the center of the state that are very rural,\u201d said Lewis.<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh: \u2018Tedious Tasks\u2019 With Human Review
Beyond providing their framework to others for the Local Government Academy, the City of Pittsburgh is also part of the national GovAI coalition of local, state and federal government officials who are \u201cunited to promote responsible and purposeful AI in the public sector,\u201d according to its website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Belasco and Hayhurst pointed to cities like San Jose and Long Beach in California as leaders in using AI responsibly in the public sector.<\/p>\n

Long Beach advocates for citizen voice in the AI implementation process through programs like the Long Beach Collaboratory<\/a> which invites community members to work with city staff to come up with technological solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe programs that they do are brilliant. And so that\u2019s probably the city that I look to the most and try to talk to the most,\u201d said Hayhurst.<\/p>\n

Blaine Kuehnert, a CMU PhD student focusing on responsible AI, said that while San Jose is \u201cat the front of the pack,\u201d Pittsburgh is \u201cnot far behind\u201d in creating AI guidelines. He believes governments need to be intentional about implementing AI instead of using it as an easy fix to a problem.<\/p>\n

Belasco and Hayhurst emphasized that AI would only be used for \u201ctedious tasks,\u201d not to replace city workers. They said that use of AI for administrative tasks must include human review.<\/p>\n

Currently they are testing a model of a \u2018Citybot,\u2019 a version of 311<\/a> that would help city residents file certain requests. Hayhurst said it would \u201cprompt them to get better answers so that we could get that information to our operations faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

A detail from the presentation poster on AI use by the City of Pittsburgh\u2019s Innovation Team. <\/p>\n

(Stephanie Strasburg\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

They are also looking into using generative AI tools in the process of permit intake, emphasizing that they are not interested in replacing any plan reviewers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to figure out how to enable their work to happen more productively. It\u2019s not a replacement strategy,\u201d said Belasco.<\/p>\n

Belasco and Hayhurst also stressed the importance of being selective with the kinds of vendors they are using. They said one of their guiding principles when thinking about vendors is to protect city data and the privacy of city residents. The city uses Microsoft CoPilot to ensure all data is situated only within the city\u2019s unit of Microsoft.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf residents are trusting city employees with data, we\u2019re asking our employees to use our enterprise tool so that it does stay within the boundaries of our environment,\u201d said Belasco.<\/p>\n

When they do disclose data, Belasco said it goes through a rigorous review process and the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center.<\/p>\n

Allegheny County: Emphasizing Transparency
While Allegheny County has an AI policy<\/a> in place, they are working to develop an AI operations manual to help their staff better understand responsibilities and guidelines related to the technology. They expect to release it publicly within the next few months, according to County Manager John Fournier.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there isn\u2019t a very clear case where this is going to make things better for people in the county, we\u2019re not going to use it,\u201d said Fournier.<\/p>\n

Fournier said he hopes being transparent with residents about how county agencies use AI will help establish trust that \u201cwe\u2019re doing good work and we\u2019re making good decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t want to see AI replacing human involvement in governmental processes, but rather views AI as a tool that can help Allegheny County employees do more in their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernment has to involve people and I think the leadership in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County deeply understands that,\u201d said Schwanke, who is advising the county.<\/p>\n

The National Stakes: Concerns Are More Than \u2018Friction\u2019
Research and experience nationally has shown that relying on AI in a government setting can put citizens at risk.<\/p>\n

A 2024 report by TechTonic Justice,<\/a> for example, describes how most low-income people in the United States receive their benefits from systems that are highly reliant on AI. Residents in need may be falsely denied benefits they were entitled to because the decision was offloaded to an algorithm or AI with no human review.<\/p>\n

The report lists examples of states where AI has harmed vulnerable citizens. In Arkansas, these systems cut the in-home care of 4,000 disabled people. In Michigan, 40,000 people were falsely accused of unemployment insurance fraud. In Texas, 4 million people would potentially lose health insurance because of a \u201clabyrinthine\u201d Medicaid enrollment system, according to the report. In each of these cases, according to the report, no human review was employed, leaving vulnerable citizens struggling to receive the resources they needed.<\/p>\n

Kuehnert listed other examples such as a case<\/a> in which a risk assessment tool, COMPAS, was used in the judicial system to inaccurately determine a defendants\u2019 likelihood of recidivism.<\/p>\n

He also pointed to a pre-AI predictive risk model that was applied to a family screening tool in Allegheny County in 2017. A paper from the ACLU<\/a> stated that tools like this \u201care created with arbitrary design decisions, give families no opportunity for recourse, perpetuate racial bias, and score people who may have disabilities as inherently \u2018riskier.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Alex John London, a professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at CMU, pointed to cases like these as examples of where use of AI could be more harmful than helpful. He said that responsible AI depends on making sure the interests of the people are represented. Much of this depends on the goals of political leaders, he said.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Alex John London, professor of ethics and computational technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, poses for a portrait on July 9 at the Tepper School of Business on CMU\u2019s campus. <\/p>\n

(Claira Tokarz\/Pittsburgh\u2019s Public Source)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether we use those things well or badly is really a function of how well we understand our tools and the ends to which we\u2019re committed. That\u2019s less about the AI and more about what the goals of our leaders are and what ends they use these tools to pursue,\u201d said London.<\/p>\n

AI is unique in how fast it\u2019s evolving and the scale at which it is being deployed, according to Elise Silva, director of policy research at PittCyber. It comes with cybersecurity risks that are unprecedented. Yet, she wants local governments to realize that big technology changes have always impacted governance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have lived through great change and we have adapted. Some of the governance structures that we have in place can work now, but they need to be adapted to the unique risks of this particular technology,\u201d said Silva.<\/p>\n

London noted that with the invention of the internet, many government processes that relied on paper and pen became digitized. In many ways, this increased the speed of things. He doesn\u2019t view AI as different from other innovations. He is more concerned with how people are thinking about the consequences of AI as \u201cfriction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat frightens me the most is when people think that [discussion of] ethical and responsible AI is just friction \u2014 that we\u2019re just trying to hold people back from the grand future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I would say is \u2018No, what I\u2019m trying to do is ensure that the future that we reach is a future that we want.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This story first appeared in Pittsburgh’s Public Source. Read the original here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI is increasingly a tool of local government \u2014 but uptake may be slow across Allegheny County suburbs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-249883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}