AI task force urges Cincinnati to adopt AI policy, pilots and a local AI lab; requests $200,000 to start

Rob Richardson Jr., a lead organizer of a regional AI task force, told the Economic and Cultural Opportunities Committee that the city must adopt clear AI policy goals, train staff and residents and begin pilots to avoid falling behind other cities. Richardson argued AI can both displace and create jobs and said the task force has drafted policy recommendations and concrete pilot proposals for municipal services.

Richardson outlined three possible local scenarios for AI—no change; large-scale job loss; or job creation accompanied by a skills gap—and said the third is most likely unless the region invests deliberately in training and infrastructure. “AI should be used to empower people, not replace them,” Richardson told the committee, and added, “Mindset is the biggest limitation to AI. It is not a technology problem.”

He pressed two near-term priorities: low-cost, high-impact pilots (permitting and building-inspection workflows, translation services for non-English speakers, procurement streamlining and pavement/pothole sensor programs) and a multi-year plan to develop local compute capacity. To address rising compute costs he proposed a locally accessible AI lab—“not a data center” but a shared lab where local businesses, schools and small organizations can access compute at lower cost—and suggested Avondale as a potential site.

On funding, Richardson said the task force requested $200,000 from the city as a floor to launch pilots and training and estimated that, with city cooperation, the group could leverage that sum to attract additional private and federal funding; he also noted specific program incentives (an Ohio Tech Credit reimbursement example that can reimburse about $30,000 for cohorts of participants). Council members discussed the draft policy the task force circulated and the likely need for continued funding beyond an initial seed.

Committee reaction and next steps: Council members praised the concrete pilots and pressed for clarity on governance and funding scale; Vice Mayor Kearney and others told Richardson the committee would review the draft policy and consider how to empower staff to run pilots. The committee did not take a formal vote on funding during the meeting and instead asked staff and presenters to continue coordinating ahead of the task force’s MidwestCon presentation in September.

Examples and safeguards: Richardson repeatedly emphasized human-in-the-loop decision-making, safety testing and adversarial prompting to limit errors and bias; he called for embedding equity into training and model testing after citing known accuracy disparities in facial-recognition technology for darker-skinned people. He named potential partners including Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Procter & Gamble and local universities and said the task force has already prepared a report and pilot recommendations the committee can review.