How local governments can prepare for and maintain AI success
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Strategic partnerships, thoughtful procurement and progress monitoring are valuable levers for local governments to deploy AI solutions in their communities, officials say.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly transforming how local governments deliver services to residents and innovate agencies’ operations. But fully unlocking the technology’s potential is dependent on careful consideration and planning to support agencies’ innovation goals, officials say.
In Alexandria, Virginia, for example, officials recently launched an initiative that aims to innovate how the city monitors and manages its roadways, said Hillary Orr, deputy director of transportation and environmental services for the city, during the Government AI Summit hosted by Nextgov/FCW and Route Fifty last week in McLean, Virginia.
The project aims to explore how tech solutions like smart cameras and sensors can offer officials real-time insights about road conditions, such as identifying potholes or cracks in pavements, to inform decisions about proactive maintenance and broader traffic safety efforts, she explained.
But local governments like Alexandria “can't spend the time and resources to deploy something and then fail. We just don't have the money to do that or the time, frankly,” Orr said.
One way local governments and agencies can help get their AI projects off the ground is to forge partnerships with organizations that can help fill expertise or resource gaps, she said. Alexandria, for instance, is collaborating with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which will help the city test road scanning technologies under its initiative.
These kinds of partnerships offer local governments the opportunity “not only vet the technology, but also provide data back to vendors so that they have the opportunity to improve their products,” Orr said.
Revamping the procurement process is another way officials can support innovation at the local level, she said.
“If you think about the traditional [request for proposal] and how long it takes … the technology landscape may have changed by the time you can actually get a company on board, so I think there's a lot of room for innovation in that space,” Orr explained. The RFP process also forces governments to know what the solution to a problem is, but “we don’t always know what the solution is, and sometimes we want more information,” she added.
To adopt and implement AI solutions more efficiently, officials can consider using a call for innovation, which can streamline the information gathering process, Orr said. She pointed to one such call that Alexandria released in August seeking information on mounted-vehicle technology pavement conditioning monitoring.
The online form prompts vendors to select or write answers to questions from the city, such as what kind of technology they use to assess pavement conditions, the type of user interface their solution leverages, their method of data collection and others.
“We tailored it in a way that it’s very quick for them to fill out to show us … how [their] product aligns with our goals of our project,” Orr said. With a call for innovation, “it’s really fast to go out and … gather that information.”
It’s also critical for local governments to benchmark their progress to further support innovative projects and adjust them as needed to ensure sustained success, said Holly Hartell, chief information officer for Arlington County, Virginia.
County officials, for example, establish clear definitions of operational measures and standards to inform how they assess the rollout of AI-related efforts, she explained.
The county also recently built an internal dashboard to track and monitor the progress of technology-driven solutions that are implemented, Hartell said. The dashboard assesses how on track a project is in relation to the county’s digital strategy, which calls for officials to consider factors like cybersecurity, transparency and environmental sustainability when implementing new tech solutions.
With those metrics, officials can identify where progress is lagging behind and “dig into that a little bit … to help nudge us towards the direction of what we're trying to achieve with our strategic plan,” Hartell said.