San Jose Mayor Uses AI to Transform City Functions

Published Date : 18/07/2025 

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is leading the charge to integrate AI tools into city operations, aiming to train 1,000 city workers to use technology like ChatGPT. This initiative promises to streamline processes and enhance services for the city's residents. 

Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points. “Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture.

Other politicians might be skittish about admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example. He is pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley's biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology. Mahan said adopting AI tools will eliminate drudge work and help the city better serve its roughly 1 million residents.

He’s hardly the only public or private sector executive directing an AI-or-bust strategy, though in some cases, workers have found that the costly technology can add hassles or mistakes. “The idea is to try things, be really transparent, look for problems, flag them, share them across different government agencies, and then work with vendors and internal teams to problem solve,” Mahan said in an interview. “It’s always bumpy with new technologies.”

By next year, the city intends to have 1,000, or about 15%, of its workers trained to use AI tools for a variety of tasks, including pothole complaint response, bus routing, and using vehicle-tracking surveillance cameras to solve crimes. One of San Jose's early adopters was Andrea Arjona Amador, who leads electric mobility programs at the city’s transportation department. She has already used ChatGPT to secure a $12 million grant for electric vehicle chargers.

Arjona Amador set up a customized “AI agent” to review the correspondence she was receiving about various grant proposals and asked it to help organize the incoming information, including due dates. Then, she had it help draft the 20-page document. “The way it used to work, before I started using this, we spent a lot of evenings and weekends trying to get grants to the finish line,” she said. The Trump administration later rescinded the funding, so she pitched a similar proposal to a regional funder not tied to the federal government.

Arjona Amador, who learned Spanish and French before she learned English, also created another customized chatbot to edit the tone and language of her professional writings. With close relationships to some of the tech industry's biggest players, including San Francisco-based OpenAI and Mountain View-based Google, the mayors of the Bay Area's biggest cities are helping to promote the type of AI adoption that the tech industry is striving for, while also promising guidelines and standards to avoid the technology's harms.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced a plan to give nearly 30,000 city workers, including nurses and social workers, access to Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, which is based on the same technology that powers ChatGPT. San Francisco's plan includes “robust privacy and bias safeguards, and clear guidelines to ensure technology enhances — not replaces — human judgment.” San Jose has similar guidelines and hasn't yet reported any major mishaps with its pilot projects. Such problems have attracted attention elsewhere because of the technology's propensity to spew false information, known as hallucinations.

ChatGPT's digital fingerprints were found on an error-filled document published in May by U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS): 

Q: What is the main goal of Mayor Matt Mahan's AI initiative in San Jose?

A: The main goal is to train 1,000 city workers to use AI tools, which will streamline processes and enhance services for the city's residents.

Q: How is Andrea Arjona Amador using AI in her role at the city’s transportation department?

A: Arjona Amador uses ChatGPT to secure grants and to help organize and draft grant proposals, as well as to edit the tone and language of her professional writings.

Q: What are some potential risks of using AI in city operations?

A: Potential risks include the technology's propensity to spew false information (known as hallucinations) and the cost of implementing and maintaining AI tools.

Q: What is San Francisco's plan regarding AI in city operations?

A: San Francisco plans to give nearly 30,000 city workers access to Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, with robust privacy and bias safeguards and clear guidelines.

Q: What is the market research group Gartner's prediction about 'agentic AI' projects?

A: Gartner predicts that over 40% of 'agentic AI' projects will be canceled before the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls. 

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