A City's AI Upskilling Program Empowers Staff to Build Tools - GovTech

The program is a 10-week, city-led training initiative developed in partnership with San Jose State University; it has been shared with the GovAI Coalition so others can use it as a blueprint. The course of study complements other AI developments from the city, including a similar AI training for residents. Experts believe that AI will cause the next digital divide, but employees with AI skills are expected to drive business gains for their organizations.

San Jose’s program has helped employees across the enterprise — from the IT Department to the Department of Transportation to the Fire Department — develop their own unique AI use cases to support and streamline their own work processes.

Paulina Hen, a project manager with the IT team, built an AI assistant to help draft project charters, significantly reducing the time she spends writing and reviewing documents and meeting notes. What used to take months, she said, can now be done within a day.

Hen first became conversant with AI through the city’s upskilling program. Prior to that, her perspective was largely shaped by her children, who asserted that using AI could earn them an “F” grade on schoolwork. Still, as the city introduced AI, she said her curiosity grew. Her job entails reading a lot of contracts and documents and she was interested, she said, in AI's potential to summarize content.

The program taught her that she could leverage AI to have her own assistant at work — in a manner of speaking, she said. She learned how to teach the AI model, training it with specific examples of what the target outcome should look like, how it should be structured, and the tone of language that should be used.

“For me, it’s definitely a lot faster in terms of getting documents out there,” she said.

Employees, however, cannot rely solely on AI to do this work, Hen emphasized. While the technology won’t replace her job, she said that it does help her do her job “tremendously faster.” Residents benefit from the tool as well because it frees up staff time to instead be spent strategically exploring how processes impact residents and planning improvements.

Amanda Nichols, associate construction inspector for the transportation department, also participated. Before the AI Upskilling Program, she had been using AI for about a year in her work, she said via email. She experimented with how AI could support her in streamlining repetitive tasks, improving written communication and organizing information.

While she was effectively using it as a productivity tool, her knowledge gap was in the ability to effectively engineer prompts, build AI assistants, and structure information for reliable results. The AI upskilling program, she said, gave her confidence to develop practical AI-powered solutions for her workflows.

“Through the city’s AI training, I was able to structure and condense my ideas, bringing them to fruition with the Landscape Inspection Assistant,” she said. The assistant she designed reviews proposals to ensure alignment with city requirements.

Nichols’ work involves manually reviewing contractor proposals and invoices for errors and documenting them — doing it in Adobe took hours away from other tasks. Contractor changes compounded the challenge of ensuring city landscape specifications were met, and errors such as omitted information made more work for both city staff and the contractor.

The AI Upskilling Program, Nichols said, gave her the tools to reduce the time spent searching documents and communicating back and forth to address necessary corrections: “Instead, I now have an AI assistant that helps streamline these tasks, allowing for faster turnaround times and improved communication throughout the review process.”

The Landscape Inspection Assistant has reduced proposal revision time from more than five hours of reviews and emails to one or two minor corrections and emails, Nichols said, underlining that she can now often approve proposals within one business day.

The AI Upskilling Program is empowering staff across departments, per a city news release sent by email. A San Jose Fire Department employee built an AI tool that verifies trucks are equipped before deployment. In the IT Department, an employee built an AI assistant providing staff support for Power BI dashboards.

Other city employees, whether in San Jose or another locality, can use AI, too, to support or streamline their workflows.

Hen’s advice is to be conscious about security, maintain human oversight, and be open to learning — and, through data inputs, AI models will learn with their users.

Nichols urged city staff to take advantage of available AI training opportunities. She also stressed the importance of identifying a daily challenge that AI could help streamline and letting that be a motivating force.

“The best AI solutions are not necessarily the most complex,” Nichols said. “They are the ones that solve a specific challenge and make everyday tasks easier.”