Washington local and state tech leaders describe cautious, collaborative push to adopt AI

City and state technology leaders, a county information-security official and the attorney general’s office told a legislative committee Tuesday that Washington governments are actively piloting artificial intelligence but are pairing experiments with policies, human oversight and security safeguards to reduce risks.

The presentations before the Technology, Economic Development and Veterans Committee laid out how Seattle and the state are testing dozens of smaller AI pilots, building centralized data and review structures, and using a controlled “sandbox” environment for testing — while warning that federal action could limit states’ ability to regulate AI.

Seattle’s chief technology officer, Rob Lloyd, said the city has run roughly 40 AI pilots and treats many early deployments as learning experiments before scaling. "You can't fire the bot, but the person is responsible," Lloyd said, describing the city’s approach of using AI as an assistant while keeping people as final decision‑makers. He described using small pilots (he said many were in the roughly $10,000–$50,000 range) to learn before moving to larger, strategic investments. Lloyd highlighted uses such as robotic…