Raleigh CIO outlines AI uses, draft policy and guardrails during council briefing

Mark Wittenberg, the City of Raleigh’s chief information officer, briefed the mayor and City Council on Oct. 12 about the city’s current and planned uses of artificial intelligence, the status of an internal AI policy and steps the city will take to protect data and manage public‑facing deployments.

Wittenberg said the city has run AI projects for years but is now focusing on generative models and “deep learning” tools such as large language models. “The human is at the center of all this,” Wittenberg said, describing humans as the final check on model outputs and the source of accountability.

The presentation matters because the city plans to expand AI into services residents use and into infrastructure management, while the council and staff consider how public‑records law, privacy and security apply to AI‑generated content.

Wittenberg described three tiers of AI work the city is using and testing: an internal chatbot called “Raleigh” that answers IT and HR questions; a web‑search assistant pointed specifically at city web content; and department‑specific models, including a closed model used by Public Utilities to analyze historical records and predict pipe failures. He said the public‑utilities model was built by a contractor, Affirmed, and that the model has been trained on records the city assembled into a…