How can artificial intelligence (AI) benefit the citizens of local governments — and how can you implement this technology in your organization successfully? According to the 2025 MNP Municipal Report, 23 percent of local governments are currently using AI and an additional 31 percent are actively evaluating how to use AI within their organization.

Reference: 2025 MNP Municipal Report

One example of how AI can help support the citizen experience is by removing friction in government interactions — making local governments faster and more responsive. The City of Burlington, in partnership with Microsoft and MNP Digital, recently augmented its in-person customer service with an AI-powered digital assistant to reply to citizen inquiries on its website. The City also harnessed AI to help streamline the review of building permits, cutting the approval process from 15 weeks to five to seven weeks.

While many local governments are successfully using AI, others are realizing they’re not quite ready to implement a new system. Our first article in this series focuses on the opportunities that generative AI programs such as Microsoft Copilot offer to local governments looking to embrace AI capabilities. This article will examine how AI can transform the citizen experience and provide a roadmap to guide you on your AI journey.

If your local government is considering AI adoption, it is important to differentiate between two types of AI. Each type has a different scope and use case, and it is crucial to understand how each can support your organization:

• Enterprise AI — Transforms core organizational processes to improve service delivery and deliver strategic insights. This includes AI models trained on organizational data and virtual assistants integrated with internal systems.
• Productivity AI — Helps employees save time on tasks, reduce repetitive work, and increase individual productivity. This includes AI writing assistants, scheduling assistants, or note-taking tools. Examples include off-the-shelf tools such as Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.

Local governments are using AI to provide value to both citizens and employees in a wide variety of ways, including:

• Improved decision-making: AI can identify patterns in large quantities of data so local governments can make more informed decisions, such as infrastructure improvements to areas with high traffic congestion.
• Faster service delivery: Automating routine tasks like permit processing, public record management, and responses to citizen inquiries speeds up service delivery and improves citizen satisfaction.
• Predictive analytics: AI can predict maintenance needs for public infrastructure to reduce downtime and save costs or forecast demand to ensure resources are allocated efficiently.
• Increased community engagement: AI can analyze feedback from social media, surveys, and other services to help local governments better understand citizen needs and tailor their systems accordingly, such as adding a new bus to a busy route.

This is not a comprehensive list — and AI can provide numerous other ways to transform the citizen and employee experience. However, the examples above can serve as a helpful starting point for your local government to start considering how it wants to use AI.

Gaining access to quality data is a key challenge facing local governments. AI is trained on data — and if your organization does not have the foundation to provide your AI with quality data, it cannot make quality decisions. This makes a robust digital infrastructure just as critical as physical infrastructure for future local government operations.

A modern data foundation includes these three components:

• Cloud: Storage and compute, as well as cloud-based warehouses for structured and unstructured data.
• Interoperability: Tools to bring data together from multiple sources such as finance systems or citizen portals.
• Governance: Standards for data accuracy, completeness, and consistency as well as metadata management and privacy and compliance frameworks.

Understanding and mapping your processes is necessary to gain access to complete data. Different departments within your local government interact in unique ways, and your data should support informed decision-making across these flows. This helps break down data silos and ensures your AI is trained on accurate and complete information.

While it may be tempting to implement AI rapidly, it is necessary to have a plan in place for how you will use it. Once you have confirmed that your local government’s data foundation can support AI, ask yourself these questions to determine where AI can best support your organization:

• Do you have large datasets that are too complex for humans to analyze efficiently?
• Do your employees spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks that could be automated?
• Does your organization need to scale up processes without increasing human capacity?
• Does your local government have a large amount of technical debt that needs to be debugged, converted, or rewritten?
• Do you need tools to monitor and protect your technology environment?
• Does your local government need to enhance citizen engagement and satisfaction?

The answers to these questions can help you identify the areas where AI could be most helpful to your local government. This enables you to align AI use with your strategic goals and identify opportunities for test pilot cases.

You are ready to move from strategy to action after you have identified whether your local government has the data foundation it needs to support AI and aligned its use with your business objectives. This 10-step roadmap can help guide you on your AI journey:

AI offers many exciting new opportunities for local governments to enhance the experiences of both citizens and employees. However, it is important to have a plan in place to ensure data quality and strategic alignment before you get started.

Asking yourself these questions can help you determine whether your organization is prepared to bridge the gap between AI desire and readiness:

• Do you have the modern data foundation to provide AI with high-quality, complete, and accurate data?
• Have you aligned AI with your strategic priorities?
• Have you updated your governance frameworks to include AI?
• Have you identified low-cost, low-risk AI tools to test through pilots?
• Have you clearly defined the success metrics for AI test pilots?
• Can you scale successful pilots to provide organization-wide value?
• Are feedback mechanisms in place to measure citizen and employee satisfaction?

If you’re ready to take the next steps but don’t know where to start, reach out to your local MNP advisor to learn how you can embrace AI and boost efficiency across your local government.