County leaders feeling hesitant about artificial intelligence (AI) entering their workplaces need to realize the technology is already there – and will be a boon to them and their staffs, said a National Association of Counties (NACo) expert in the newest episode of Podcast 83.

Rita Reynolds, NACo’s chief information officer, and host Stephan Currie conducted a wide-ranging discussion on AI terminology, its scope and how county leaders can use a new NACo toolkit to adapt to this seminal technology.

“When you start looking at some of those recommendations in generative AI, and were we first going to start seeing it in county government, where are we going to see it initially?” Currie asked. “Is it in the back office? Is it front office? … Talk a little bit about that, where you're starting to see counties implement some generative AI.”

“Early on ― and even now ― there's a definite focus with what we would call the productivity applications, which really, mostly, are the back office,” Reynolds replied. “So, for productivity, it's those type of tasks where I'm doing the same thing over and over, and it's taking me a lot of time, or it is so repetitive that’s why I can hand this off to someone.

“And it could be as simple as meeting notes, having the artificial intelligence work for you during a meeting and summarize the meeting minutes at the end of it, it could be taking a chunk of information, maybe you've written something for an article, but you're not happy with the way it's worded. Or you need to reword it in simpler terms. And so that's generative AI, as we call it, the tool that allows you to put information in and it generates out a response that is potentially easier to understand or more professional.”

“What do you foresee the future now is of this toolkit?” Currie asked.

“We already do have a game plan and a roadmap. Basically, the toolkit is live on the naco.org website. … There's also an interactive, tabular type page that allows you to say, ‘I'm an elected official, take me to those sections that I need to really be aware of.’ And it'll take you to the benefits, the challenges, the opportunities, some use cases and then several, not all, of the work recommendations,” Reynolds explained.

“I would like to just mention,” Reynolds concluded, “from the challenge perspective, the (NACo) committee was very cognizant that there are areas such as accuracy, relevancy and, of course, particularly bias that could be in the data. And we've all said all along, there's always been that type of problem. Generative AI just brings it to the forefront and actually gives counties now the opportunity to be better at cleaning up the data and making it relevant.”