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Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points.

“Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture.

Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley’s biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology.

Mahan said adopting AI tools will eliminate drudge work and help the city better serve its roughly 1 million residents.

He’s hardly the only public or private sector executive directing an AI-or-bust strategy, though in some cases, workers have found that the costly technology can add hassles or mistakes.

“The idea is to try things, be really transparent, look for problems, flag them, share them across different government agencies, and then work with vendors and internal teams to problem solve,” Mahan said in an interview. “It’s always bumpy with new technologies.”

By next year, the city intends to have 1,000, or about 15%, of its workers trained to use AI tools for a variety of tasks, including pothole complaint response, bus routing and using vehicle-tracking surveillance cameras to solve crimes.

One of San Jose’s early adopters was Andrea Arjona Amador, who leads electric mobility programs at the city’s transportation department. She has already used ChatGPT to secure a $12 million grant for electric vehicle chargers.

Arjona Amador set up a customized “AI agent” to review the correspondence she was receiving about various grant proposals and asked it to help organize the incoming information, including due dates. Then, she had it help draft the 20-page document.

So far, San Jose has spent more than $35,000 to purchase 89 ChatGPT licenses -- at $400 per account -- for city workers to use.

“The way it used to work, before I started using this, we spent a lot of evenings and weekends trying to get grants to the finish line,” she said. The Trump administration later rescinded the funding, so she pitched a similar proposal to a regional funder not tied to the federal government.

Arjona Amador, who learned Spanish and French before she learned English, also created another customized chatbot to edit the tone and language of her professional writings.

With close relationships to some of the tech industry’s biggest players, including San Francisco-based OpenAI and Mountain View-based Google, the mayors of the Bay Area’s biggest cities are helping to promote the type of AI adoption that the tech industry is striving for, while also promising guidelines and standards to avoid the technology’s harms.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a plan Monday to give nearly 30,000 city workers, including nurses and social workers, access to Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, which is based on the same technology that powers ChatGPT. San Francisco’s plan says it comes with “robust privacy and bias safeguards, and clear guidelines to ensure technology enhances — not replaces — human judgment.”

San Jose has similar guidelines and hasn’t yet reported any major mishaps with its pilot projects. Such problems have attracted attention elsewhere because of the technology’s propensity to spew false information, known as hallucinations.

ChatGPT’s digital fingerprints were found on an error-filled document published in May by U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” commission.

In Fresno, California, a school official was forced to resign after saying she was too trusting of an AI chatbot that fabricated information in a document.

While some government agencies have been secretive about when they turn to chatbots for help, Mahan is open about his ChatGPT-written background memos that he turns to when making speeches.

“Historically, that would have taken hours of phone calls and reading, and you just never would have been able to get those insights,” he said. ”You can knock out these tasks at a similar or better level of quality in a lot less time.”

He added, however, that “you still need a human being in the loop. You can’t just kind of press a couple of buttons and trust the output. You still have to do some independent verification. You have to have logic and common sense and ask questions.”

Earlier this year, when OpenAI introduced a new pilot product called Operator, it promised a new kind of tool that went beyond a chatbot’s capabilities. Instead of just analyzing documents and producing passages of text, it could also access a computer system and schedule calendars or perform tasks on a person’s behalf. Developing and selling such “AI agents” is now a key focus for the tech industry.

More than an hour’s drive east of Silicon Valley, where the Bay Area merges into Central Valley farm country, Jamil Niazi, director of information technology at the city of Stockton, had big visions for what he could do with such an agent.

Perhaps the parks and recreation department could let an AI agent help residents book a public park or swimming pool for a birthday party. Or residents could find out how crowded the pool was before packing their swim clothes.

Six months later, however, after completing a proof-of-concept phase, the city didn’t buy a full license for the technology due to the cost.

The market research group Gartner recently predicted that over 40% of “agentic AI” projects will be canceled before the end of 2027, “due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.”

San Jose’s mayor remains bullish about the potential for these AI tools to help workers “in the bowels of bureaucracy” to rapidly speed up their digital paperwork.

“There’s just an amazing amount of bureaucracy that large organizations have to have,” Mahan said. “Whether it’s finance, accounting, HR or grant writing, those are the kinds of roles where we think our employees can be 20 (to) 50% more productive -- quickly.”

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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is ticking toward a record on Thursday following some better-than-expected updates on the economy and a mixed set of profit reports from big U.S. companies.

The S&P 500 was up 0.5% in afternoon trading and on track to top its all-time high set a week ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 252 points, or 0.6%, as of 2:24 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was adding 0.8% to its record set the day before.

Trading was calmer than Wednesday’s, when President Donald Trump jolted financial markets by saying he had discussed the “concept” of firing the chair of the Federal Reserve but was unlikely to do so. Such a move could help Wall Street get the lower interest rates it loves but would also risk a weakened Fed unable to make the unpopular moves needed to keep inflation under control.

A strong profit report from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. helped drive tech stocks, and its net income soared nearly 61% in the last quarter from a year earlier. The chip maker said it’s seeing strong demand from artificial-intelligence and other customers, and its stock that trades in the United States rose 4.1%.

Other stocks involved in AI also climbed, and a 1.2% gain for Nvidia was one of the strongest forces pushing upward on the S&P 500.

PepsiCo jumped 7% after delivering revenue and profit that topped Wall Street’s expectations. The drink and snack giant also stood by its financial forecasts given in April, which projected lower full-year profit than previous forecasts due to increased costs from tariffs and a pullback in consumer spending.

United Airlines flew 3.8% higher after reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It also said it’s seen an acceleration in demand from customers that began in early July, and it’s expecting less uncertainty about the economy to hurt its business in the second half of this year.

Lucid Group’s stock surged 37.1% after it said Uber is aiming to use 20,000 or more of its vehicles over six years in a robotaxi program. Using an autonomy system by Nuro, it expects to launch “later next year in a major US city.”

Uber, which plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Lucid and Nuro, saw its stock edge down by 0.2%.

On the losing side of Wall Street was Abbott Laboratories, which fell 8% despite delivering results for the latest quarter that edged past analysts’ expectations. The health care company cut the top end of its forecasted range for revenue growth over 2025.

Elevance Health dropped 12% after reporting a weaker profit than analysts expected. It cut its forecast for profit in 2025 because of rising medical cost trends in its Affordable Care Act business, along with other factors.

Also falling were shares of Archer-Daniels-Midland and Ingredion, makers of high fructose corn syrup. Trump said Wednesday that Coca-Cola has agreed to use real cane sugar in its flagship soft drink in the United States at his suggestion, though the company has yet to confirm that.

Ingredion dropped 0.8%, and Archer-Daniels-Midland fell 1%.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady following several better-than-expected reports on the economy.

One said that shoppers upped their spending at U.S. retailers by more last month than economists expected. Such spending, along with a relatively solid jobs market, has helped keep the U.S. economy out of a recession.

A separate report said that fewer U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, which could be a signal of limited layoffs. A third suggested unexpectedly strong growth in manufacturing in the mid-Atlantic region.

Such solid data could keep the Federal Reserve on pause when it comes to interest rates. The Fed has been keeping rates steady this year, after cutting them at the end of last year. The Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, has been insisting that he wants to wait for more data about how Trump’s tariffs will affect the economy and inflation before the Fed makes its next move.

That’s because while lower interest rates could goose the economy and prices for investments, they would also give inflation more fuel. And prices may already be starting to feel the upward effects of tariffs.

Thursday’s strong economic helped push the two-year Treasury yield, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed, up to 3.92% from 3.88% late Wednesday.

Longer-term Treasury yields were mostly steady, though, and the 10-year yield remained at 4.46% from late Wednesday. The Fed has less influence over these yields, where investors in the bond market carry more sway.

Bond investors had briefly driven longer-term yields higher on Wednesday, when fears were high that Trump may fire Powell. The president has been angrily calling for Powell to cut interest rates, and a less independent Fed may end up keeping short-term rates low in the near term. That, in turn, could allow inflation to run higher in future years.

Longer-term yields then relaxed after Trump said he was unlikely to fire Powell.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia.

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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Make American Coke Great Again?

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Coca-Cola has agreed to use real cane sugar in its flagship soft drink in the U.S. at his suggestion — though the company didn’t confirm such a move.

Any switch from high-fructose corn syrup in Coke sold in the United States would put Coca-Cola more in line with its practice in other countries, including Mexico and Australia. But it wouldn’t affect Trump’s drink of choice, Diet Coke, which uses aspartame as a calorie-free beverage.

“I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them — You’ll see. It’s just better!”

A spokesperson for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement that the company appreciated Trump’s enthusiasm and promised that more details on new offerings within its products would be shared soon.

Coca-Cola didn’t elaborate. But the company has long indulged U.S. fans of cane sugar by importing glass bottles of Mexican Coke to the U.S. since 2005.

Returning to sugar in U.S. production, meanwhile, might affect the nation’s corn farmers, whose yields are used in artificial sweeteners.

“Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar doesn’t make sense,” Corn Refiners Association President and CEO John Bode said in a statement. ”President Trump stands for American manufacturing jobs, American farmers, and reducing the trade deficit. Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit.”

Trump himself is such a fan of Diet Coke that that he had a red button installed on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that he can press to have a White House butler bring one in for him.

Despite his fondness for Diet Coke, his relationship with the company hasn’t always been sweet.

In a series of posts in 2012, Trump suggested diet soda might be connected to weight gain before eventually writing, “The Coca Cola company is not happy with me — that’s okay, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage.”

A bottle of Diet Coke could be seen sitting next to his chair years later, at a G20 summit in 2017. And The New York Times reported in 2018 that he was drinking a dozen Diet Cokes daily.

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Associated Press writer Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit and Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this story.