Today’s Morning Buzz is by Aarón Zavala, Assistant to the City Manager for Pleasanton, CA. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
What I’m currently craving: A sandwich on the patio, overlooking vineyards, from the Dry Creek General Store (As a Santa Rosa native, I highly suggest visiting this slice of paradise while you’re in Town for Camp GovLife!)
What I’m looking forward to this fall: Outside of conference season, College Football Season! Go Trojans! #FIGHTON ✌🏽
What I’m experimenting with: Anthropic’s Claude’s native integration with monday.com
ChatGPT Wrote This Title (And Your Competitor’s Staff Report)
I started in local government in 2016 and discovered ELGL shortly after. One of my first pieces for ELGL back in 2017 was about emerging technology in local government. The title was forgettable, but the message holds up: technology is rapidly changing, and I want to talk about AI and the myth that it’ll take your job.
Full disclaimer: I’m that early adopter friend. 🙋🏽From the earliest age, I was fascinated by technology, but to be honest, when AI really jumped onto the scene, I was a tad intimidated. This may have been from watching too much Terminator as a child, but I really wasn’t aware.
Everything changed in early 2023. I was serving on the Board of Directors for the Municipal Management Association of Northern California (MMANC) and offered to help put on our Winter Forum. Our brilliant chair, Katie, who was doing fascinating data work in Stockton, led us through “Data Deep Dive.” When creating content, none of our team knew the session descriptions were actually written by ChatGPT from OpenAI. This was only months old and not mainstream yet. We were at the brink of a technology revolution.
I believe AI is our next defining leap, like the internet was. I’m young enough not to remember life without the internet, but old enough to remember when families had encyclopedia sets instead of Wikipedia. When the internet came, our society experienced an exponential increase in technology. We’re there again with AI.
I was in a different organization than I am now (shout out to the other P-Town, Petaluma, and visit downtown when you’re in Sonoma County!), but I was lucky to explore and innovate as one of two early AI adopters in our city. When showing our City Manager what AI could do, my colleague’s first attempt produced a generic, cookie-cutter report with no relevant detail about our project.
Lesson #1: garbage in produces garbage out.
I told my manager, “Give me time, I’ll show you what it can do.” I pulled content from previous staff reports, including historical data and narrative, and built a comprehensive prompt incorporating all the prior knowledge it could take. The result? A tailored recommendation that took into account our background and previous discussion context. We were off and running.
When I broached the subject of having our management analyst team learn AI and prompting, there was immediate resistance. From what I gathered, there was a fear that someday AI would replace the work of Management Analysts.
And that’s ultimately what I want to dispel: Management Analysts are generalists by nature. As you move up the ladder in local government, you become less and less of a specialist. We know a little about everything, and if we don’t know something, we figure out how to acquire it. AI has freed up my bandwidth, automating and reducing time spent on tedious tasks that drain me, allowing me to spend more time on critical thinking, leading, and building bridges.
At the end of the day, the internet was once new and scary, but look where we are today. It didn’t go anywhere, and now most local government professionals have a pocket computer accessing endless bytes of data. AI won’t go anywhere either. Don’t be scared of jumping in. The reality is, your colleague is probably already using it.
5 Tips and Tools to Leave You With:
- Use paid versions: Free versions learn from your data; paid versions offer protection and control
- No personal identifying information (PII) or sensitive material: Self-explanatory but critical
- Take time to learn prompting: Competency in prompting is gold
- Don’t rely on one tool: Like a knife block, each tool has its specialty
- Don’t forget your voice: I’m lucky to have supervisors with communications backgrounds who remind me not to lose mine. Remember this when using AI
Tools I’m Currently Using:
- Claude: Excels at writing with game-changing native integrations
- ChatGPT: Helps brainstorm and build systems
- Perplexity’s Comet Browser: What Google Chrome wishes it was, with sources and an AI agent
- FellowAI: You can’t get back time; my personal notetaker for volunteer board meetings and long commutes
- Grammarly/Superhuman: AI-powered writing help and email management for speed and productivity