Fix the Pillars Before You Add AI
“There were four pillars holding that bridge: people, process, data, and governance.”
Picture someone standing at one end of a bridge, trying to cross from no AI to AI adoption. Underneath that bridge are four pillars holding it up.
AI itself isn't a fifth pillar you're missing. It's what crosses the bridge once the other four are solid. If one of those pillars is cracked, adding AI on top doesn't get you around the problem. It just finds the crack faster and shows it to everyone.
That's why the most useful shift we've seen isn't a technology decision at all. It's a change in the question municipalities ask first.
Start with the actual problem. Where are residents getting stuck? Where is staff doing repetitive work? Where do applications keep coming back incomplete? Sometimes the answer is AI. Sometimes it's a simpler form, better web content, or a records cleanup. AI has to prove it's the right tool for that specific job, not the automatic one.
It also helps to separate two ideas that get blurred together constantly.
Before reaching for an AI solution, a quick gut check is worth running:
● Do you know which problem you're solving, or are you hunting for a place to apply AI?
● Is your data organized enough that a tool could actually use it well?
● Does a named person own the decision to adopt AI here, not just "IT"?
● Has your organization agreed on what human review looks like before AI output goes anywhere near a resident?
If the honest answer to most of those is no, that's not a reason to wait on AI forever. It's a reason to work on the pillars first.
“AI needs to earn its place rather than becoming our default answer to everything and anything”
Waiting doesn't mean staying still, though. AI is already showing up inside tools municipalities are using regardless of whether they've made a formal decision to adopt it.
That's the reassuring part. The same four things that made past technology shifts, cloud, mobile, 311 systems, actually work are the same four things that will make AI work now. Nothing about AI changes what holds the bridge up. It just changes how fast you'll find out whether your pillars are ready.
This is one of the themes from our recent webinar, Getting Started with AI in Municipal Government. Want the full discussion on people, process, data, and governance before AI? Watch the replay here
This article was prepared with the assistance of AI.