How the city of San Antonio is using AI
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The city of San Antonio is experimenting with artificial intelligence in the workplace, but don't expect to see any major new AI initiatives too soon.
Why it matters: AI is upending the job market and how businesses work. Local governments aren't immune to the impacts.
State of play: City employees use Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot, and some departments are running experiments to see how AI could help in certain operations, chief information officer Craig Hopkins tells Axios.
- He says the ultimate goal is "not to replace the human being, but to create an assistant to the human being."
Zoom in: The city is testing how AI could work as an interpreter at public meetings for languages such as Mandarin.
Reality check: Some AI experiments haven't panned out. The San Antonio Police Department found that AI wasn't very good at monitoring security cameras for signs of something that needed human attention.
What they're saying: With "just about everything, the technology's not really ready yet," Hopkins says. "I really feel we're on this edge."
- He thinks the city could tinker with experiments for another five years before making any big purchases for AI tools.
Zoom out: AI bots are gaining on us when it comes to common tasks in the office, per a new OpenAI tool that evaluates AI model performance on "economically valuable work."
The big picture: Hopkins believes employees should learn how to use AI to help them advance in the workplace in the future.
- But he also says humans still need to be accountable for the work AI does — for example, if AI processes housing applications, a person should still review those and stand by the final decision.
- And every company should be especially careful about using AI with personal or health care data, he says.
The bottom line: "As human beings in the workforce, it's about teams, it's about empathy, it's about relationships," Hopkins says. "You can't take away those human things from the job."