Chattanooga’s ‘tech guy’ mayor reflects on embrace of AI, quantum

LAS VEGAS — The city of Chattanooga in Tennessee has strived to establish itself in recent years as a place in the south that’s embraced technology and innovation.

The city has already implemented a citywide fiber network for high-speed broadband internet and is making significant moves into quantum computing with the nation’s first center for the technology, in partnership with its public utility, EPB, as well as the private sector.

Meanwhile, Chattanooga has embraced artificial intelligence and the cloud, with its tools helping boost IT employee productivity by 65%, cutting correspondence time by 75% with generative AI, shortening the time it takes to conduct research and enhancing road safety by identifying crash hotspots and traffic patterns.

It makes for an exciting time for the city of just over 190,000 residents, even though, unlike many of its fellow cities in Tennessee, it lacks a major research university. That will change, however, as Vanderbilt University has partnered with EPB and others to establish the Institute for Quantum Innovation in downtown Chattanooga.

Route Fifty caught up with Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly — a self-described “tech guy” who ran several businesses and startups before running for the office in 2020 and winning reelection last year — on the sidelines of the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas last week to learn more.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ROUTE FIFTY: Broadly speaking, when you think about using technology as a city, what are your aims? What do you want to do with it?

TIM KELLY: We came in with this notion of innovation and how we could innovate government. We were already on Google Workspace, I was already a Google fan, so it was a very good time to get involved… I've always looked at tech as the way strategy really executes in a faithful and consistent way. The problem that we have, and many cities have, specifically Chattanooga, is that we have a strong mayor-form of government, which means that we have almost complete turnover every eight years. That is, I've come to understand, a huge peril for a city. In addition to all the gains in productivity and efficiency, I've come to believe that it's going to be a really important piece to ensure continuity.

What we're working on now gets all the way down to data governance, so that we can make sure that that's great over time. The obvious stuff that Google's really helped with all has to do with gains in productivity, providing better answers faster and restoring faith in government. Efficient and effective government is one of the pillars in my framework. But the continuity piece I've only recently stumbled upon as being an important part.

ROUTE FIFTY: I've never heard of tech being used for continuity before. What's the thinking there? How do you kind of approach that side of things?

KELLY: I've had turnover in a communications position, and rather than asking that new communications director to go read everything possible on me, they can literally scrape out with NotebookLM everything I've said about any given topic. That applies broadly across the enterprise for not only a new hire coming to an existing government, but imagine the transition. I've got three years left, and I'm not quite sure how that will unpack, but my plan is, when we do hand over, to have a package ready that will ensure continuity to the greatest extent possible. Tech will make that a hell of a lot easier than it would have otherwise been.

ROUTE FIFTY: I assume agency heads go out the door with you, and all kinds of stuff. It's just this image of hundreds of years of experience just following you out the door and over the horizon, right?

KELLY: At the federal level and even at the state level, the size of the bureaucracy, which is what we often hear referred to as a “swamp,” there's a damn good reason for that. That is institutional continuity at the municipal level. That's not always the case. As I think about AI more broadly, it's a big level up for smaller organizations, smaller businesses, smaller cities across the board. This is one way that it can solve the problem.

ROUTE FIFTY: I'd love to talk more about the productivity and efficiency side as well. What does it look like for your employees to leverage AI?

KELLY: Most of that is very pedestrian, and has to do with pushing them to use the tools. But there's, as I knew there would be, this lightbulb moment that goes the first time somebody figures out AI and what it can do for them. NotebookLM was really the first one that really made it easy, because we get so many giant reports dropped on our desks that are damn near impossible, with constraints of time and bandwidth, to process. It's literally an accelerator. Prior to that, you had two choices: stay up all night, destroy your quality of life, burn out and actually ingest all that stuff and render the correct decision, or — which is way more often — skim it, or take somebody else's word for it, who might have some other angle that they're trying to prosecute. It seems subtle, but it's not subtle. That’s the productivity gains.

ROUTE FIFTY: What's that been like for your staff, getting them on board? It sounds great to us tech nerds. Has it been an easy transition to get them thinking about this stuff?

KELLY: Not at first. At first there was a great deal of fear and loathing. We had to start with the propeller heads. It was a crawl, walk, run thing, and my admonition to them was just to use it, report back. Use it, report back. We actually had a chat thread to share our wins and our fears. It took a couple of years, honestly, for people to gain confidence, and of course, the tech was evolving at that time too. But I think we are now officially at a point where they're bringing me cool [stuff], as opposed to me forcing it upon them. I talked to a lot of mayors who have yet to really go through that, but I'm a bit of an evangelist for it, because I do think it has the potential to restore faith in government.

ROUTE FIFTY: Tell me some of this cool [stuff]. What's some things that are lighting your fire right now?

KELLY: Some are easy, some are not. Some of the easy stuff, it's like using AI to scope sewers. We have a combined stormwater and sewer system that would have normally taken us a lot more time to find leaks in there, and very real environmental impacts for that. It turns out, we can do that [with AI], and it's doing a job that people don't want to do anyway, and it's doing it a hell of a lot faster and a whole lot cheaper than we could. One that I had great hopes for, but it's taken a lot longer than I would have hoped is smarter traffic management. I was very excited about it when I first heard about it, but at the time didn't realize first we have to replace all the switch boxes in 600 square miles of intersections. That requires a tremendous amount of capital investment, and that can be very difficult politically, because if you're saying, “I'm going to invest in this, and here's the candy immediately,” that's easier than, “We're going to invest in this and you're not going to see,” That's where we are. Because of that municipal fiber grid, we already have a great deal of data and a lot of smart switches and LiDAR.

Every American city, particularly in the American South, is facing pretty stout levels of growth. Chattanooga is not as high as, let's say, Huntsville, Alabama or some others. But NIMBYism [not in my backyard] is definitely a problem. My take on it is that the reason for that, largely, is anxiety about traffic. The fact is, we live in a low tax state, for better or worse, and we do not have the infrastructure dollars we need. To me, it's about efficiency, because if we can get the lights truly camera driven and a synchronized traffic grid, it will be as though we've added another lane for traffic. It will help alleviate this problem. If we don't do that, growth is going to come to a grinding halt.

ROUTE FIFTY: Thinking of your role as an evangelist, when you're out there with other mayors, whether that's the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, or your municipal leagues, how do you evangelize about tech and AI, especially to the folks who maybe are way behind you?

KELLY: If I have a skill, I'm a very practical, nonpartisan mayor, so it depends on who you're talking to. I don't really have a dog in the hunt. I do want to see better government generally, but you can figure out political affiliation pretty easily. There's the efficiency pitch, which is very compelling. Then there's the engagement pitch, of saying, “This is actually going to help you engage your residents and serve your residents a lot better.” The fact that matters is they're both equally true. I have always been a bit of a tech guy, which is kind of unusual. A lot of [mayors] just aren't, so they have to be able to see not so much where it is, but what it can do for them.

ROUTE FIFTY: This is very philosophical. I know there's 20,000 cities in this country, but do you think there's going to end up being more mayors like you who are tech guys and girls?

KELLY: I hope so. The book that really inspired me to run for mayor was The New Localism, by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak. The way it came away to me was that we might have the political pantheon inverted. Cities were the birthplace of democracy. They are where most of the innovation happens. They are where 90% roughly of the [gross domestic product] globally is produced.

Because of these revolutions in technology and finance, cities offer the ability, now more so than ever, to create extraordinary quality of life, and the apex of human thriving. I say this a lot of times just to be provocative. But state boundaries and even federal boundaries are really abstractions. Cities are not abstractions. My hope is people see that as an opportunity. It's what happened to me. I made enough money, which is not a great deal, but I'm not a materialist. And then realized this is the greatest thing I could be doing with my life.

ROUTE FIFTY: What is it about Chattanooga? You guys have had the fiber network for years, you’re looking at quantum, you're looking at AI. Is there something in the water down there? What do you put it down to?

KELLY: It is very interesting. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that it's some corollary of necessity being the mother of invention. We're not a state capital. We don't have a big university presence. Whatever we have there, we've had to ground out ourselves. It was essentially a brand-new city after the Civil War, and it was always a crossroads, and there was always a big union element and a southern element. It's strangely cosmopolitan for a city of its size, and that culture is a very welcoming and collaborative culture. I'm suspicious anytime someone tells me, “Oh, this place is different,” because I tend to believe human nature is human nature. But I've talked to enough people who have come there from elsewhere to say, “No, it really is different.”

ROUTE FIFTY: What's next? What's on your mind for the next 12 months for the city?

KELLY: For Chattanooga, this is starting to get very interesting. A lot of the projects that we're working on are really just now coming to fruition. The city is doing a great job because of this AI technology, but soon the quantum thing is about to get very, very real. One big piece of the puzzle that Chattanooga has been missing is a fully resourced research university. Every city really needs one. There's a correlation there between economic growth and them. Despite all our fiber, we haven't fully broken the glass ceiling into the knowledge economy. One of the books that really frightened me in running for mayor was The New Geography of Jobs [by Enrico Moretti]. We were on the wrong side of that divide. Vanderbilt opening that school and investment by these quantum companies hopefully will open this new economic chapter for us.