Deploying Artificial Intelligence to Advance Wisconsin Cities and Villages
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Quora’s Poe, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini are popular examples of generative AI, which was first released to the public in November of 2022. Generative AI allows us to create things like text by predicting what comes next in a sentence. The technology behind generative AI, called predictive reasoning, was first developed in 2019 and helps the AI understand patterns and respond in smart ways. Generative AI gives us the ability to create new content, such as text, images, audio, video, or code, based on patterns it has learned from existing data. Generative AI is built on training and machine-learning algorithms that analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns, enabling the creation of new content that resembles the data it was “trained” on, such as the Internet, books, and other electronic publications. In a recent study, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found 40% of Americans aged 18 to 64 use generative AI. A separate 2024 Salesforce survey further discovered 64% of generative AI users are either Generation Z or millennials. AI use will undoubtedly continue to grow, with younger generations expecting some government services to be delivered through AI, such as chatbots mimicking text conversations with government employees. Municipalities Are Using AI to Improve Efficiency and Effectiveness The use of generative AI offers Wisconsin municipalities a wide range of practical benefits. It can help staff overcome writer’s block and improve communications as they draft and edit emails, memos, meeting agendas, ordinances, and policies. It can also assist in evaluating policy compliance and conducting program analysis, acting as a built-in research assistant. Using AI starts with a “prompt” which is a clear instruction or input you give to an AI system like ChatGPT to guide its response or output. Your prompt can be a question, a command, or a description. The back and forth you enter as you refine the AI output is known as an “iterative process” and is different than asking Google for an answer to a question. Start with the basics . AI doesn’t have to be daunting. Practical first steps include using it to rephrase a response to a resident or colleague, proofread and polish correspondence, or check tone for clarity and civility. As municipal staff become comfortable with these simple uses, they can begin exploring
Wisconsin cities and villages, along with counties and towns, are beginning to embrace the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance employee capabilities and increase citizen service levels. What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial intelligence, known as AI for short, refers to computer systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence. AI offers a spectrum of capabilities from the simple to the complex. AI includes rule-based systems (e.g., the operation of traffic lights) and pattern recognition systems (e.g., spam filters on your email). This technology is already firmly embedded in our lives. Online shopping recommendations, fitness trackers, social media feeds, music streaming, navigation aids, ride-sharing apps, and image recognition are all examples. You likely have received anti-fraud notices from your bank or credit union asking you to verify whether you used your credit card at a merchant – that’s AI. The language and image recognition capabilities of AI is advancing rapidly. In the 2013 movie “Her,” actor Joaquin Phoenix’s character develops a relationship with an AI-intelligent operating system with a female voice. The system calls itself Samantha, and actor Scarlett Johansson provides the voice. Many movie viewers thought the interaction powered by AI was both cool and unbelievable, but here we are in 2025, and this, along with so much more, is reality. The graph below published by Our World at Data https:// ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabilities- relative-human-performance demonstrates AI’s increasingly rapid development pace. AI experts like Ethan Mollick at the Wharton School of Business argue AI capabilities will develop in the future at an even faster pace.
The Municipality - October 2025 | 6
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