As the interim CTO of the City of Seattle and leader of IT-related projects within the city’s departments, Jim Loter has deep insights into how municipal employees use emerging technology and the steps necessary to manage the risks associated with generative artificial intelligence.
Speaking on a new episode of the Shift AI Podcast, Loter mentioned a new learning initiative that will bring city employees together to explore this new technology.
“Our interest is learning more about what problems our clients internal to the city are trying to solve, and then help match them up to tools that we can both manage in a sustainable way, mitigate the risks, and also help them be productive,” he said.
One of Loter’s goals is to build internal systems and checkpoints to implement AI safely and responsibly: “I’m very interested in understanding how these department officials are using the tools, but also how they’re evaluating how effective they are.”
Those are some of the insights from Loter in this episode of Shift AI, a show that explores what it takes to adapt to the changing workplace in the digital age of remote work and AI.
Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from his comments, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com.
Role at the City of Seattle: The city of Seattle IT department provides consolidated IT services for most, if not all, of the city’s departments in the executive branch. Everything from acquisitions and procurement to operational management to IT projects to application development is all done in our department. It’s a big and complicated enterprise, but what I love most about it is that we are all partnering every day with city departments to deliver services that help improve the quality of life for people here in Seattle. Being mission-driven is important to me.
Developing the City of Seattle AI guidelines: I didn’t want to just sit in a dark room and mull it over within our department, or just assign it to one of our program managers and say, here, go figure this out. I wanted to get the perspective of multiple stakeholders. We took a pretty thoughtful and, for government at least, pretty rapid approach to engage stakeholders at the University of Washington, at the Allen Institute for AI, our own citizen advisory board, and our community technology advisory board. We brought in some folks from Microsoft and we consulted with folks from Adobe and from AWS to give us their perspectives on what was emerging. We tried to take a very holistic look at it, and came out with our current policies that are guided by some very common-sense approaches focused on what’s new and what’s novel about this technology.
Protecting the public: There’s really nothing new about our mandate to protect the public’s privacy or the public’s data. Whatever system we put it in, whether it’s a traditional IT system or a new AI system, we just need to highlight, more than come up with anything new, and take it as an opportunity to remind our employees, everything that has always applied to technology applies to this.
Human-in-the-loop as a focus: Human-in-the-loop reviews focus on fact-checking for accuracy of the information, and attribution. We want to put something out there and say this was generated in whole or in part by this particular GPT technology, to be transparent. Every day, city government makes decisions and takes actions that have profound impacts on the lives of residents, and I think we have a responsibility to identify and manage the AI risks and the uses of AI in our environment to allow our residents to see that they are being used in ways that align with the city’s goals and values.
Collaboration with Mayor Bruce Harrell: Back in June of 2023, I had the honor to accompany the mayor to a meeting of the U. S. Conference of Mayors in Columbus, Ohio. Mayor Harrell is the chair of that organization’s technology and innovation committee and as you can imagine, generative AI was top of mind for most of the city leaders who were present at that conference. And so I was able to present our work to date and raise questions that I felt city leaders needed to be considering as they approached this new world. That was very rewarding, and it didn’t take long to start generating a lot of interest in conversation among the mayors who were present.
City employees are leaning in: At the city, our next step in implementing our responsible AI program is to convene a community of interested city employees. We planned an event, we advertised it within the city, and ended up with an overwhelming amount of interest from city employees who want to learn more about the technology, about what we’re planning to do with the technology and how their colleagues are using it.
Listen to the full episode of Shift AI with City of Seattle Interim CTO Jim Loter here.
