AI Co-Pilots for Every City Worker

Matt Mahan brings a civic-tech lens to the mayorʼs office in San José. Raised in a working-class family, he taught middle school through Teach for America before becoming a tech entrepreneur, leading civic-engagement startups like Causes and Brigade that tried to give residents more voice in public life. He was elected San Joséʼs mayor in 2022 on a platform of common-sense accountability, promising to tackle homelessness, public safety, and quality-of-life issues with the same data- driven rigor he brought to startups.

Under Mahan, San José has treated AI as both a productivity tool and a workforce skill. The cityʼs AI Upskilling Program, a roughly 10 to 12 week course run with San José State and other partners, trains staff to design their own AI assistants for tasks like processing purchase receipts, spotting patterns in 311 requests, and analyzing parking data, with a goal of training at least 15 percent of the workforce by 2026. Early cohorts report meaningful time savings but are required to fact-check AI outputs and respect privacy controls, so internal data doesnʼt leak into public training sets.

The new push to give all 7,000 city employees access to generative AI chatbots is the next step in that strategy. San José is preparing an RFP for a citywide platform that lets staff build custom co-pilots on a secure municipal stack, aimed at automating routine work like drafting reports, summarizing long documents, and answering policy questions so employees can focus on higher-value problem- solving and direct service.

Mahan has paired this experimentation with a governance model meant to reassure both workers and residents. San José helped launch and now chairs the GovAI Coalition, a multi-jurisdiction network sharing standards, policies, and open-source tools, and the city maintains a public AI inventory, vendor FactSheets, and an eight-principal framework that emphasizes effectiveness, transparency, equity, privacy, security, and human oversight. Together, the training, tools, and guardrails are designed to make AI feel like a well-regulated utility, something every public servant can use, but within clear boundaries that protect community trust.

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