AI spotlight: Promoting responsive and responsible AI use in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Leaders at every level of government are using artificial intelligence to help their teams, offices and agencies work more efficiently and effectively.   

The Partnership for Public Service AI Center for Government™ is publishing a series of blog posts to celebrate how AI and intelligent automation are being used in government to serve the public.  

Recently, we sat down with Tim Moreland, director of special projects for Chattanooga, Tennessee, to learn more about how he encouraged his team to get started with AI. 

Piloting responsible AI use

What does the responsible rollout and use of artificial intelligence look like? 

This was the question that Tim Moreland was asking at the beginning of 2024. He could sense that city staff needed to, in his words, “get in front of this [AI] wave that’s coming.” As he seized opportunity, Moreland considered the potential risks of rolling out AI across the workforce.  

So, he started small.  

“We gave a [limited] group [of staff] access to things like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, and asked them to play around, you know, try it out. Where do you find value? What’s good, what’s challenging, where are your use cases?” Moreland explained.    

Encouraging Experimentation

Moreland surveyed his early adopters and discovered that “they wanted to know what the guardrails were, and they wanted to know what the best practices were.” In response, he established an ‘AI for Good’ community of practice.   

Lessons from that group helped Moreland develop governance policies and establish use cases. Now, Chattanooga’s municipal government is preparing to equip all city employees with training on and access to generative AI technology. 

Promoting responsive use cases

The Chattanooga city government regularly approaches AI use from the perspective of the public. Moreland shared several recent projects his team has built to serve residents’ needs:  

What: Synthesize and simplify the city legislative code 

• Why: Build transparency. While private sector developers or city lawyers become familiar with the city code through regular use, the text can be opaque and hard for the public to understand. 

• How: Collaborate with city offices to provide straightforward explanations of city ordinances with links to citations from the city code. 

What: Identify potholes 

• Why: Be proactive and build trust. While potholes on arterial roads may be filled quickly, residents regularly request pothole fillings in their neighborhoods.  

• How: Use external innovation grant funding to purchase a computer with stronger processing power, enabling the team to collect and interpret pothole sensing data from city vehicles like garbage trucks.  

Building community

The Partnership for Public Service AI Center for Government™ champions AI innovators across all levels of government.    

If your agency is working to implement and lead in AI, we’d love to hear from you. Join us as we highlight real-world AI use cases and convene public sector leaders from across the country to share tools and insights to lead confidently in the age of AI.  

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