Peoria County board seeks AI governance after CIO reports 294,522 AI connection requests in April

Mark Little, Peoria County’s chief information officer, told the board June 2 that county telemetry recorded “for the month of April, there were 294,522 AI connection requests to some type of generative AI software.” Little said that figure includes background technical traffic and that about 238,000 of the requests came from logged‑in county accounts while roughly 56,000 came across guest wireless networks.

Little told the committee he has circulated a white paper with recommendations to move justified AI uses to purchasable government models, expand monitoring through Cisco Umbrella to separate guest from managed users, and create an AI governance council to vet tool justifications, oversee licensing and training, and require human‑in‑the‑loop review. He proposed using existing IT fund balances or creating a short‑term AI fund to pilot defense tools such as CrowdStrike’s language‑model monitors and data‑classification tools like Microsoft Purview.

Why it matters: Little warned that unrestricted use of public consumer models risks exposing sensitive county data. “If you take information in a report and upload it to [a commercial model] and then it has fed the language model and then it's there and you're not going to get it back,” he said, urging the board to pair policy with technical controls before widening use.

Members pressed Little on specifics. Member Linda E. Daley said many visitors and staff may not realize the extent of monitoring: “I just think a lot of people are not aware that when they come in here and sit down, if they have these things, they're being monitored.” Little replied that the county monitors traffic on its network but does not monitor personal devices at home under current setups and that some of the April volume is background activity from commercial services.

Member Eden S. Blair raised data‑protection concerns for health records and HIPAA exposure if non‑anonymized protected health information were placed into public models; Blair said the county should promptly notify staff and departments of risks. Member Danny Phelan warned of workforce impacts and overreliance: “I have a genuine concern that our employees will utilize it more than what they probably should,” he said, urging an acceptable‑use policy and tighter selection of licensed models.

Little told the board he already has a draft acceptable‑use policy and recommended routing it through legal and human resources but sought the board’s endorsement for a governance council to finalize vendor choices, training and reporting. He cited a separate data finding that the county has about “7 billion files in our storage in within our network here for about 17 terabytes of information,” and said data‑classification tools will be required to understand what the county holds before exposing it to models.

Next steps: The committee asked staff to accelerate policy work. Little said he would continue vendor testing, review monitoring tools and return with a recommended governance structure, licensing plan and cost estimates. No formal action was taken at the June 2 meeting beyond discussion and direction to proceed.