By Elias Tomaras, Corporate Consultant - Chief Operating Office - City of Calgary, Canada
What if every municipal employee had a policy expert, strategist, and data analyst at their fingertips? Municipal governments have always faced a unique challenge: doing more with less while staying responsive to the public and aligned with constantly shifting strategic priorities.
Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key part of that conversation. Yet too often, AI in local government has been limited to supporting operational tasks such as chatbots, permit tracking, and traffic optimization, rather than assisting the employees responsible for strategy, planning, and performance measurement.
With 15 years of experience in project management and business strategy in municipal government, I have seen firsthand how small information gaps can slow down planning, create rework, build silos, and delay service delivery. These experiences have dramatically influenced how I view the potential of AI.
I see an opportunity for a different kind of AI implementation that empowers the people behind the plans. It is time to start thinking of AI not just as an automation tool, but as a digital subject matter expert embedded in our daily work, helping employees make better, faster, and more strategic decisions.
Helping Employees Think Strategically with AI
Picture this: you are preparing a business case for a new community initiative. You want to ensure it is aligned with Council priorities, uses the correct templates, and incorporates relevant community feedback and past customer service request trends. Today, that might require days of document searching, cross-referencing policies, and interpreting community engagement data.
Now imagine a secure Strategic AI Assistant, trained using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods, which allow it to pull trusted information directly from your municipality’s strategic plans, policy library, service requests, and operational data. Instead of generating information on its own, the Assistant retrieves and summarizes content from your organization’s verified documents to answer questions accurately.
You could ask, "How does this initiative align with our current Council direction and departmental priorities?" or "Summarize feedback from our recent community engagement and how it relates to our project objectives."
The Strategic AI Assistant does not make decisions for employees. It simply brings trusted information to their fingertips, helping reduce assumptions, minimize rework, and create more time for engaging with the community, interested parties, and building public trust.
A Strategic AI Assistant Adds, Not Substitutes
AI delivers the most value when it’s used to augment—not replace—human expertise. Municipal employees make countless judgment calls every day: Which policy applies here? Are we following internal procedures? Is this approach consistent with our values and strategic goals?
A Strategic AI Assistant supports employees by providing real-time access to critical information. Trained on trusted municipal content, it can:
Because it draws from shared knowledge across departments, the Strategic AI Assistant also helps foster a more integrated, organization-wide approach to planning and service delivery. It connects insights that might otherwise remain siloed.
Vision to Action: Making the Strategic AI Assistant Real
Understanding the benefits is one thing. Turning them into action is another.
For municipalities already using Microsoft Copilot, the foundation is already in place. A secure, customized Strategic AI Assistant can be built using Copilot Studio, focused specifically on internal policies, strategic planning, and service alignment. Employees could access it seamlessly through familiar tools like Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, or SharePoint, wherever they already work.
Imagine a policy analyst preparing a Council report. Rather than spending hours searching through folders for feedback summaries, past initiatives, and relevant policies, they simply prompt the Strategic AI Assistant. Within seconds, it retrieves the most relevant information and helps draft a summary that reflects current Corporate priorities.
It might begin with simple prompts such as:
As the Strategic AI Assistant matures and as employees’ skills and confidence using AI continue to grow, the prompts can become more advanced, unlocking deeper strategic insights, such as:
The key is to start small, build trust, and expand as employees become more comfortable using AI. As the Strategic AI Assistant and employee confidence grow, the capabilities can evolve beyond simple tasks to support deeper strategic functions. Over time, municipalities could use it to forecast service demand, identify cross-departmental collaboration opportunities, and model budget or policy scenarios with greater precision.
As cities grow and complexity increases, employees need tools that can help them model long- term impacts, explore policy trade-offs, and make scalable decisions that serve both current and future generations. By providing this level of planning support, municipalities can stay
responsive to emerging demands while maintaining alignment with their long-term strategic goals.
Building Trust Through Responsible AI Governance
Responsible implementation is essential. AI adoption must be grounded in strong privacy practices, transparent communication, and internal governance that ensures AI tools support policy objectives and public accountability. Municipalities already have robust policy foundations, and AI should reinforce them, not undermine them.
Secure access must also be a priority. If organizational tools do not evolve alongside societal expectations, employees may turn to unapproved platforms, increasing the risk of data exposure. A secure Strategic AI Assistant, backed by clear policies, responsible practices, and a well-trained workforce, will help ensure that AI is used safely, consistently, and in ways that strengthen public trust.
Governance must also address emerging risks specific to AI. The Strategic AI Assistant should be explicitly configured to cite trusted sources, provide associated links wherever possible, and transparently indicate its level of confidence in the information it generates. These safeguards
are essential to minimize the risk of incorrect outputs or "AI hallucinations," while ensuring employees have clear visibility into how information is derived.
Employees must remain the final decision-makers, using the Strategic AI Assistant as a tool to inform and strengthen critical thinking rather than replace it. To prevent inconsistent adoption across departments, municipalities should align AI use with corporate governance standards and provide clear training on responsible and ethical use.
With the right safeguards in place, municipalities can build trust in AI tools while protecting organizational integrity and public confidence.
Final Thoughts
AI is emerging as a powerful tool for municipal employees, helping them work smarter, make better decisions, and stay connected to what matters most: delivering citizen-focused services. The goal is not simply to make internal processes more efficient. It is to strengthen public trust, elevate strategic decision-making, and enhance service responsiveness and accountability.
By embedding a Strategic AI Assistant into daily work, municipalities can empower employees to deliver services that meet citizen expectations, strengthen cross-departmental collaboration, and maintain service excellence even as they prepare for future growth. These advancements
are built on stronger insights, better strategic alignment, and decisions that are responsive to the evolving needs of diverse communities and citizen expectations.
Let’s give municipal employees the modern tools they need to deliver smarter, faster, and more citizen-centered outcomes.
