Management

San Jose Approves Its First AI Budget Allocation

The city intends to apply that spending toward its recently formed GovAI Coalition.

Dominick Sorrentino is web editor for StateTech.

The San Jose City Council recently approved the California city’s first budget allocation dedicated to advancing the use of artificial intelligence to improve city services.

“This budget allocation will allow the city to continue its efforts to lead the GovAI Coalition with the founding agencies and help other cities implement safe and responsible AI solutions,” says Chelsea Palacio, public information manager for the San Jose Information Technology Department.

The GovAI Coalition, which first launched in 2023, extended an invitation in March of this year to public agencies, civic organizations, academic institutions and private sector companies to join them in developing guidance for public sector AI implementation.

Since making that announcement, the coalition has more than doubled in size, from 150 agency members to more than 300 as of late June. Agency entities include more than 180 cities, 20 state agencies, 80 counties, five federal agencies and more than a dozen agencies within education, transit and utility districts.

More than 50 private sector vendors have also joined the coalition.

“The coalition has gotten so big and so many people want to be involved that we’ve had to create individual working groups within the committees,” Palacio said.

She anticipates hitting the thousand-agency mark by the end of the year.

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San Jose Develops Toolkits, Templates and Generative AI Guidelines

As part of its March announcement, the coalition released a toolkit to assist organizations with safe AI adoption, and a public letter encouraging policymakers to use the toolkit within their own agencies. The toolkit contains the following resources:

Templates for an AI policy and AI policy manual
Template for an AI incident response plan
AI fact sheet and vendor agreement
A repository of guides for AI use cases being tested by other agencies
A vendor registry of AI systems available for government use
A guide for AI governance and use

San Jose began positioning itself as a steward of government AI best practices well before it announced the GovAI Coalition.

In August 2023 — three months before the White House issued its “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” — San Jose announced a set of generative AI guidelines, according to GovTech.

The document provides practical guidance to agencies on how to use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT while maintaining data privacy and content accuracy. The guidelines recommend keeping nonpublic information out of generative AI prompts, verifying the veracity of all AI outputs, and citing and recording generative AI use cases, among other best practices.

“San Jose is the worldwide hub for innovation — and the latest innovations are happening in AI,” Mayor Matt Mahan said in the press release announcing the GovAI Coalition. “It just makes sense for our city to lead the charge in both the creation of these new technologies and the responsible use of them.”

San Jose Invites Cities to Join the Coalition

Membership requests are currently available via the City of San Jose’s website.

The coalition includes more than 600 individual representatives from cities across the country, including Austin, Texas; Detroit; Los Angeles; Sacramento, Calif.; San Antonio; San Diego; St. Louis; Seattle; and Washington, D.C., among many others.

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