Indianapolis to offer free municipal AI training and readies Copilot rollout for city employees

Colin Hill, chief information officer for Indianapolis Marion County, told the Artificial Intelligence Commission that the city has partnered with InnovateUS to offer free, multi‑level AI training to city‑county employees and is preparing permissions, data classification and pilot controls ahead of a Microsoft Copilot rollout.

Hill said the partnership with InnovateUS makes Indianapolis the first U.S. city to participate and described the training as "very deep, and has multiple levels to it." He said the program will be available to the entire enterprise of roughly 8,500 employees and that the city expects an initial pilot of about 200 Copilot users inside Microsoft 365 while broader Copilot chat availability from Microsoft will be enabled for the Government Community Cloud (GCC).

Hill and other commissioners said the city is blocking Copilot on Windows 11 desktops for now while the team works with departments to clean data, set permissions and finalize licensing. Hill warned that Copilot chat can surface content from shared drives and said those access controls must be tightened so staff do not unintentionally expose restricted material.

Hill described practical rollout steps: a required set of trainings for pilot Copilot users, an internal SharePoint that centralizes guidance, and AI innovation workshop days in April intended for about 120 participants to develop use cases for city departments. He said licensing details were expected after April 1 and that the city is working with enterprise teams to assign required training certificates and to perform data preparedness and permission audits before wider release.

Commissioners also discussed vendor change management and the risk that large vendors will enable features (like Copilot chat) broadly before governments are ready; one commissioner noted that vendors can "drop things" that require the government to test and adapt. Hill said the city prefers an enterprise‑managed offering to reduce uncontrolled use of third‑party public tools.

The commission supported using training, sandboxes and cross‑agency coordination to surface low‑risk, high‑value use cases such as translation services, pothole or blight detection and process automation. Hill said the City's Business Services team will engage departments on data and permissions before licenses are enabled.

The commission scheduled AI innovation days for April and will continue to track training and pilot progress.