AI Is Not the Strategy: Better Public Information Is

Municipal governments are under pressure to adopt AI, but AI will not create public value on top of fragmented, outdated, or hard-to-use information. Cities already hold the raw material for better service delivery: budgets, bylaws, service requests, procurement records, permits, geospatial data, performance measures, and public meetings. The problem is that this information is often scattered across portals, PDFs, dashboards, legacy systems, and institutional memory.

This session reframes AI strategy as public information strategy. Drawing on a decade and a half of federal work at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the White House, we will show how governments can get from "here to there" on AI-ready data, generative AI adoption, and emerging agentic AI patterns in knowledge work like model-context-protocals. There is a practical path for municipalities: make authoritative sources easier to find and cite, expose context and provenance, build governance into information products, measure outcomes that residents understand, and help staff use AI to reduce administrative burden while preserving human judgment.

Municipalities that organize their knowledge now will be best positioned to use AI responsibly later. AI is not the strategy. Better public information is.