‘Game on’: LA ramps up tech ahead of major sporting events

The next few years promise to be busy for Los Angeles, with the city set to help host the 2026 World Cup with a dozen of its peers, then fly solo to hold the 2027 Super Bowl and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The city also has 45 agencies and welcomes 48 million visitors each year, in addition to its population of almost 4 million. Everyone expects quicker, digitized and more efficient public services, with a government that is able to pivot quickly and cope with crises like wildfires, other natural disasters and manmade incidents.

In a bid to deal with all those competing pressures, the city recently unveiled a partnership with Google Public Sector to deploy its Google Workspace and its artificial intelligence assistant Gemini across the government workforce, including its artificial intelligence assistant Gemini. The effort, part of the city’s SmartLA 2028 vision, is intended to make employees more efficient, automate some tasks and improve communications.

Los Angeles Chief Information Officer Ted Ross sat down with Route Fifty at last week’s Google Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. to discuss the new partnership, managing residents’ expectations for delivering services and what’s to come in the next few years.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Route Fifty: Los Angeles, you've got a lot happening. You’re a little bit under the microscope, perhaps. How would you describe the feeling in city government right now? Excited, nervous, some kind of mixture of all those emotions?

Ted Ross: Cities are big and complicated, which means we've got important operations. [Los Angeles International Airport] is one of our departments, and we have the largest municipal owned utility, so we do big day to day operations. We also have emergencies. We've had them every year, but this year, we're known for having the terrible wildfires, which were the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history. It surpassed Hurricane Katrina. And then, we are preparing to host the world several times over.

The sense of feeling is for the areas that matter, they're accustomed to this. Public safety, transportation, emergency management, they're top notch. I know it's easy for me to say — I work in the city — but they really are top notch, and they've been handling this for decades. But I think when it's all said and done for city government, there's probably a bit of a feeling that we like to get on with the work at hand. What it really means is that you walk and chew gum at the same time, you handle the emergencies, you handle the disasters, and you prepare for the events.

That's why tools like Google Gemini have been important for us. We have 28,000 employees turned on with Gemini; we're providing tools to employees that transform the way they work as well as the services that we provide to the public. And it's just the tip of the spear. This is just the beginning. Generative AI is not the end of AI; we're finding AI tools embedded in all sorts of tools. Our ability to tremendously upskill, to build AI fluency in our employees, it's not just preparing them for the tools of today, but two years from now, there'll be tools that we'll need them to be able to use, and they need those capabilities.

Route Fifty: This is part of the SmartLA 2028 strategy. Run me through what the thinking is there, what are the points of emphasis?

Ross: It's funny, the term smart city sends some people crazy. The difficulty is no one wants to think of themselves as dumb. But the other side of it is, I would say that what digital transformation is to business is what smart cities are to government. What's not crazy is that our ability to leverage technology for infrastructure, for data, tools and practices, for digital services, tremendously extends our ability to deliver services to our public. It improves operations.

We're known for having a big 311 operation. We receive 3 million requests a year to fill potholes, clean graffiti, bulky item pickup, illegal dumping, you name it. We process large amounts of government services. We need Salesforce CRM. We need the ability to have chatbots. We need the ability to digitally engage people, because in a city our size, people are engaging us digitally. We need infrastructure. We need to have 5G deployment. The SmartLA ‘28 strategy is around infrastructure, around data, tools and practice, around digital services, on digital inclusion, our ability to take technology — which is the only tool that gets better every year — and then to be able to dramatically improve service delivery operations and lower costs.

The city was in the news for having a $1 billion deficit this last summer. We're not going to be able to hire mass loads of people. We're not going to be able to throw tons of money into everything. We need to be able to use tools that optimize our human resources, that allow them to do high value work and allow the machines to crunch the low value work. The Industrial Revolution allowed people to be able to accomplish a lot more work because machines were able to pick up a lot of the load. AI gives us the ability to draft professional communications that humans can read and review. AI gives us the ability to be able to sort through massive amounts of information. One hundred percent of our grant writers said they are identifying new grant opportunities where they didn't see them before because they could take 160-page documents that no human wants to read and then be able to start querying it using Google NotebookLM. These are the kinds of tools that make life even better and feel more worth living as you're knocking it through and using AI tools to be able to handle some of the grunt work that most people don't enjoy.

Route Fifty: That must be big for residents. We're now used to Amazon, where you order something on Monday and it's here by Wednesday. How do you manage those resident expectations? They also want you to work like that.

Ross: Yes, they do. They want us to be Amazon. They want us to be Domino’s, to know where their pizza is. They want us to be Facebook, so we're super engaging. They want us to be Google, so that they have all the information at their fingertips. Yes, we are compared to that, and you know what? Game on. We may not have the funding of these private-sector companies, but we also can leverage their tools. We're big Google Gemini users. We're taking the hundreds of billions of dollars, no doubt, they've invested in AI, and now we're able to consume and use that to serve the public. What does that mean for the public? Not only does it mean that we get more professional communications to them, [but] there are also multilingual communications. Something like over 234 languages are spoken in Los Angeles. Most of our employees can't speak over 200 of them. But the ability to deploy information in their native language that they can consume and understand, it's tremendously powerful.

Our ability to consume large amounts of data, to be able to find the needle in the haystack, that's super important. Our ability to be able to automate our processes. We're at a point right now where about every 48 hours, we're filling the pothole. That's not something that is often talked about, but that comes through process automation and through improvement, as well as the fact of our ability to optimize traffic, our ability to communicate a big wave of items that's coming up right now. Government has become very accurate. We've got hundreds of pages of codes and rules that are very well written and very detailed and very specific, but they're not digestible. We're at a point right now where we're finding that NotebookLM and Google Tools are giving us the ability to put chatbots out there that are highly conversational, highly accurate, because they're only consuming the codes that we're providing, whether it's permitting or inspection, etc. Something as specific as doing an addition, whether you're required to use nails or screws, and the fact that it could take hundreds of pages of true but complex content and then make it easy to understand, that's huge for the public. Welcome to a world where we can understand our government, and that's really what AI can provide, if done right.

Route Fifty: For the employees as well. Presumably they don't have to spend time reading through code enforcement rules?

Ross: There are going to be those employees who write those rules. They have to read, understand and write, but those are highly technical employees. For the rest of us, it gives us the ability to then consume what they're doing in a language we understand using a tool we understand. I manage the IT agency. People come to us. They want apps, their ability to use Google Gemini to develop a basic app to help explain and describe what it is they're trying to accomplish that they can then bring to an IT staff member. Sometimes it's good enough and we don't need to help build their app, but they can bring us a high-fidelity prototype, and we can now come and engage with them. It's sometimes so difficult to work with a constituent or work with a customer where their requirements are vague and we're trying to build software; we're going to invest money and time and energy to build something for them. With limited resources, we may be the second largest city, but every government is constrained in resources. Every government has exceeded demand over supply. Our ability to even change the nature of how we deliver it, the citizen developer, can build things without us and when they need something that we can build, now we have the ability to use user-centered design, and they can actually build stuff that we can.

Route Fifty: From an employee standpoint, I'm curious about what the training has looked like. You guys have trained tens of thousands of people. What does it look like for them? How do you get people on board? How do you bring them along?

Ross: This might sound funny coming from a CIO, but it's not about the technology. I'm reminded of the expression that there's no such thing as technology projects, there's people projects with technology. Boy, is that true with AI. Another proverb that I think is highly applicable is the African proverb that says, “if you want to go somewhere fast, you go by yourself, but if you want to go far, you go as a group.” AI is a go-as-a-group topic. And what do I mean by that? I need to bring along an entire workforce.

It used to be that people did their work before computers. Then we had computers that were introduced, and I am old enough to remember the introduction of computers in the workforce and how difficult that was for people who were not using computers to now use computers. We're in an era now where AI is going to be ubiquitous. It is going to infiltrate everything. It doesn't mean AI does everything and does it perfectly, but it will show it enhances almost everything. It enhances communications and enhances analysis and enhances a ton of things top to bottom. I need a workforce that can't be like when we were introducing computers. I need a workforce that's AI fluent. By delivering Gemini tools and capabilities now, you have something that's highly personal, something that is highly impactful. They're doing it hands-on, and they're building, whether they know it or not, their AI capability.

What does training mean for us? Well, it started with an intro to AI. We had everyone go through that. Then we started to expand on it and we started to teach on the tools themselves: Gemini the app, Gemini in inbox, Gemini in calendar, Gemini in Google Drive. These are all things they were accustomed to because we're Google Workspace users, and now they're seeing how AI enables and empowers across these different areas. We also run a set of super users. We've got 500 super users who are going through eight weeks of training. These are the folks who are ready to go hardcore. This has use cases for accountants, use cases for analysts, use cases for grant writers. Then you start to get very specific to the nature of your job. We also have people who land in the middle who are a little unsure, so we demonstrate to them. We even did sexy topics. We did preventing AI financial fraud. We brought in the Secret Service, and people love to log in. We had 3,000 to 5,000 average participants on any given training session, so it's highly consumed. People are highly interested.

And we have people who don't want to use AI at all. For that group, we explained to them, here's how you don't have to use AI. The reality is, as we all know, these tools are showing up in things, probably at home, and they don't realize they're using AI. But I think it's extremely important that privacy and security is taught; that respectable, ethical use is taught; as well as how to use the tools themselves. Again, they’re the tip of the spear.

Route Fifty: Let's fast forward to August 2028, and you’re extinguishing the Paralympic Flame. You're done, at least for now. What, from your perspective, does success look like from a tech perspective from these events for resident services?

Ross: It's a great question for two reasons. Number one, we know that we need to conduct the Games right, so first and foremost is the priority of delivering on the events where it's safe, the mobility is excellent. But the second aspect is legacy, which we'll talk about in a second, which one could argue is as important. The 1984 Olympics were a huge success, but we also had something like 1 million youth have no-cost sports since 1984 because of legacy. So for cities like ours, legacy becomes an extremely important conversation.

First and foremost is around solid digital infrastructure: everyone is able to be connected to use their connectivity to accomplish what they need to do. There's going to be so many different venues, they need to have connectivity for all the things that that's involved. There's going to be individuals coming from every country and they need their connectivity. We've got a lot already done around robust cellular infrastructure, fiber optic infrastructure, you name it. LAX has already been aggressively modernized, and it's going to have even more modernization in the next three years, including things like the people mover. We need people to be able to get in there in a multilingual, accessible experience, and get to where they need to go. Getting to where they need to go is going to be the biggest conversation for the Olympics. We already have the electronic vertical takeoff and landing. We're going to be having flying cars. We're going to be having remotely piloted vehicles. You're going to be having groups of four people at a time, flying up and flying between various venues, if you could imagine. The idea of getting people safely to where they need to be, so they could attend all the different venues, they could go to their restaurants, they could get back to their hotel, will be critical.

Public safety is huge. I would assume three years from now, we'll feel a bit like today, in a world in which you've got global conflict, you've got global challenges, and an event like this becomes a global target. The police department is already using virtual reality to train officers to be able to prepare for deescalating situations. It already puts them into events that everyone knows of Los Angeles and immersive experiences to train use of force and the lack of use of force in experiences like that. At a high level, it is a safe Olympics. It is a mobile Olympics, where everyone gets to where they need to go. It is one in which we engage people, and engage them well. It's one where people get to know Los Angeles. A lot of folks think of Los Angeles, and they think of celebrities and Hollywood and Venice Beach. There's a lot more to Los Angeles, and it's going to be an opportunity. The mayor announced Games for All; we're going to get the chance to be able to showcase all the diversity and uniqueness of who we are as a city.

On the legacy side, the reality is these are all things that aren't just build it and tear it down. These are all things that we continue with. Our 311 system is built to last. Our AI tools are built to last. Our infrastructure is built to last. After these events, there are more events. After these events, there are still 4 million people living here. We're not building throwaway venues; we're not building throwaway technology. We're not building throwaway tools. We're building things that we'll use for that, and we will use for others. And that's why I think 2026, 2027 and 2028 is wonderful, because anything you build for 2026, you'll be using for 2027 and anything for 2027 you use for 2028, so we have a runway, so to speak.

Route Fifty: That's everything from me. Any final thoughts?

Ross: Probably one of the most important things is that this isn't just an introduction of tools, but it's the start of an era. If AI is 50% towards maturity, humans are 25%, and if AI companies stopped developing the tools today, it would still take us three to five years to catch up. That's probably an important component, is how much we really need to not look at this as a set of technologies, but we need to invest in our employees. They can't get left behind. It's always been about people. This is not about cost reduction or eliminating people. This is about enabling people to deliver more and to deliver better, which means that organizations are willing to think through who their people are and how do they put them in the right place, where should they be standing?

It's funny, as a CIO, how much our investments are really in the people, the developers, the content creators. Everyone plays a role. We can understand what these tools do and build their ability to take advantage. If not, they're going to be sorely left behind, because we talk about generative AI today, but what's the tool of tomorrow? The tool three years from now, it's going to be AI-based. We need to know prompts. We need to know how to evaluate results. We need to be able to integrate into workflow like we're at the tip of something big, and we need to understand it as much as the tool itself. We understand the trend.