San Jose Gov AI Coalition offers templates, vendor registry and use cases as model for San Diego County

Jerry Recker, assistant to the city manager for the City of San Jose and a founding member of the Gov AI Coalition, outlined resources and practical use cases the coalition has developed to help local governments explore and deploy artificial intelligence. The presentation was given to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors' AI Ad Hoc Subcommittee; the meeting date is not specified in the transcript.

Recker said the coalition has produced a suite of deliverables intended to help local agencies move from early consideration of AI to testing and deployment. Those materials include governance templates intended for procurement officers and program leads, a vendor registry, a buyers guide, and performance-measurement templates aimed at standardizing what local governments ask of private-sector providers. Recker said the coalition has roughly 1,500 members representing about 500 local, state and federal agencies and that many of the materials are publicly available for download.

San Jose examples and potential county uses

Recker described multiple concrete examples from San Jose that he said could be adapted by counties: public-facing chatbots and voice assistants for information portals; real-time translation displayed at city hall; enhanced meeting transcription and searchable video archives; and enterprise approaches such as sandboxes and centralized data platforms for predictive analytics. He identified a traffic signal optimization project San Jose tested that, he said, produced travel-time reductions "by up to 20 percent." At the group and department level, Recker highlighted department-specific chat assistants and custom GPTs (proprietary chatbots built for a department) intended to speed routine tasks such as preparing procurement scopes or summarizing call data.

Recker also described San Jose's efforts to build workforce capacity: training and upskilling programs, a sandbox environment for employees to try large language models safely, and a partnership with San Jose State University to develop workforce materials and training.

Cautions and implementation guidance

Recker warned that local governments should tailor AI initiatives to organizational level and complexity (public-facing vs. enterprise vs. group-specific tools) and to department-specific needs. He noted that some projects are low-complexity, low-cost uses that can build internal momentum (for example, tools to draft memos), while others are high-complexity, high-cost projects (predictive analytics built on centralized data platforms). Recker said San Jose's proximity to Silicon Valley means the city experiences pressure from private-sector partners and emphasized the value of standardized templates and contract language to set public-sector expectations with vendors.

Recker offered to share the coalition's slide deck and said QR codes on the presentation link to the coalition's public materials. He encouraged San Diego County staff and departments to review the templates and to consider pilot projects at different levels of government.

Ending

Recker closed by inviting subcommittee members to join the Gov AI Coalition workgroups and to request the presentation materials. He said the coalition's resources are intended to be adapted by counties and cities that want to try phased, tested approaches rather than one-time large rollouts.