City staff briefed the commission on Sept. 3 about current and planned uses of artificial intelligence across municipal departments and the policies that govern those deployments.

Lede: Assistant City Manager Christian Doolin and IT staff described five city policies and department-level protocols designed to manage AI adoption, and they cited present or pilot uses including customer-service account summaries, license-plate recognition for stolen-vehicle recovery, drone collision avoidance, shot-detection analytics and utility leak detection.

Nut graf: Officials emphasized the city’s “mission-driven” approach: departments identify operational needs and then evaluate AI tools under procurement, security and incident-response policies. Managers stressed human review and validation, described training and credentialing for staff, and highlighted controls for third-party vendor integrations.

Specific examples from departments:
- Customer service: vendors such as Genesys are being used to assemble account summaries more quickly for callers, reducing time spent searching multiple systems.
- Public safety: license-plate recognition already helped recover more than 200 stolen vehicles; Axon and Skydio were named as mission-specific vendors for public-safety tools; shot-detection and drone collision-avoidance are used with human oversight.
- Utilities: pilots for water-leak detection and vegetation-management analytics to prioritize tree trimming near electric lines.

Policy and safeguards: Doolin reviewed policies 401 (software/approval and encryption), 408 (staff online tool usage and validation), 405 (incident response), 7515 (information protection/monitoring) and 809 (decommissioning). Staff said procurement and service-management processes, third-party connection agreements and operational protocols will be applied to AI deployments. Commissioners and staff discussed bias-testing, training, human verification, and the need to attach underlying policy documents to agenda items in future.

Outcome: The commission accepted the informational item and several members asked staff to return with attachments of referenced policies and to continue dialogue about testing for bias and operational transparency.