The city of Mesa will soon be the first in the state to train both the community and its employees on how to use artificial intelligence.
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From left to right are Deputy CIO Harry Meier, CIO Scott Conn, Library Director Polly Bonnett and Ian Linssen, head of the Office of Innovation, presenting a city initiative to train employees and the community in the use of artificial intelligence.
The free courses are expected to be available in May to the community, which can access through a Mesa library card. The city can do this at no additional cost to its budget by using the LinkedIn Learning software it already pays for.
“AI is becoming everything to everyone, especially from a productivity perspective,” said Scott Conn, Chief Information Officer, during the Feb. 9 study session. “Cities that invest early have already been proven to improve their service efficiency and we see that here.”
For over a year, approximately 50 employees, representing all city services, tested the training.
The courses, which last 10 to 30 minutes, are self-paced and aimed at beginning, intermediate and advanced adults – including seniors, job seekers and entrepreneurs, said library director Polly Bonnett.
“We want to provide free access to those in-demand skills that you can build over time to be more competitive in the job market,” she said. “We see ourselves as a pipeline to skilled trades and to the workforce in Mesa.”
According to Bonnett, the courses can be taken online or in person through programs the library offers. The online courses are anonymous.
“When you use these courses, we can’t track it back to a particular cardholder, but we can see how many views those courses get,” Bonnett said.
Deputy CIO Harry Meier said they are looking at how the city’s first testers are using AI in their work, while also ensuring residents’ data is protected.
“We recently surveyed that audience, surveyed everyone who has accessed the tools in the past year, and came up with the following question: What exactly are they looking for? What guidance do they need? What training will be helpful to them? And what is it really going to take to get the most bang for our buck from these tools,” Meier said.
LinkedIn Learning has more than 1,000 courses to choose from.
Meier pointed out that staff will examine all AI-generated information to ensure its accuracy, free from AI hallucinations.
The rollout to all employees is expected in a month, starting with introductory AI essentials and lessons on safe use, he added.
“In addition, we will also work with the state AI commission,” Meier said.
“The governor has created a commission to address this issue: how AI will be used in local governments across the state.
“We will be engaging with that committee over the next month to discuss what we expect to see coming from the state level – whether there are any potential regulations or legislation that they will be talking about at that level.”
Ian Linssen, head of the Office of Innovation, reminded the council that the city already has an internal AI policy that all employees must adhere to.
He also noted that because Mesa is the first in Arizona to do this, staff will undergo the training.
“We want to see if people are interested in it, do they like it? How do they use it?” he said. “It’s anonymous, but we do want to know if it works. If it doesn’t, we want to know why and maybe we can adjust it. But we think there will be a lot of excitement about it once it’s rolled out.”
According to Conn, the city has looked at several different training options.
“As far as I know, there is only one other city in the country that does this for both its residents and its workforce, and that is San Jose, California,” he said.
“So we looked at their model. They’re working with six or seven different training companies in Silicon Valley to offer this to their residents.
“We decided to take the cheaper way to make this happen and searched through all the available training that we could offer for free, and pretty much ended up on LinkedIn Learning.”
Councilwoman Dorean Taylor asked whether the city was following the employee testers’ AI prompts — the instructions or input data provided to obtain output — and if so, which ones are the most common.
Linssen responded that the city did not oversee that, but rather created a forum where employees could talk about what has worked and what hasn’t — which he said will be “really helpful.”
Taylor also questioned whether security measures are in place to protect data.
“Are we going to lock down certain departments so that they can only access certain information through artificial intelligence?” she asked. “From a security aspect, it can get quite complicated. And then people moving out of town, what they have access to and there’s so much involved.”
According to Conn, staff has outlined a multi-layered set of protections and a strategy to address the issue Taylor raised.
“We control who has access to what,” Conn said. “And we are tightening this up more and more.”
Councilwoman Jenn Duff asked at what point the city can use AI instead of relying on surveys, which Mesa spends a lot of money on and takes time to complete.
“AI can sometimes collect data from different departments and things and dig deeper into what’s happening right now to make decisions about streets or whatever,” Duff said. “Are we going to go that route of collecting our own data?
“Some cities are doing a tremendous amount of work, especially in transportation … they’re doing in-depth analysis of accidents and they can go through public safety data and then make recommendations.”
Linssen said what Duff was asking about are enterprise use cases, which are currently “very expensive” and time-consuming to implement.
“But we are absolutely looking at it,” he said. “It is certainly a direction we want to continue in.”
Conn added that one of the low-hanging fruits is the data analytics capability.
“We have the data,” he said. “We assume it’s good. We just have to run the analysis tools on it using AI and it will help us determine those things without the help of a consultant.
