Louisville leaders say AI embrace will have ‘guardrails,’ ‘people making decisions’ – Louisville Public Media

Louisville Metro officials announced the city’s first partnership with an AI company this week.
The Department of Codes and Regulations is going to work with Govstream.ai in an effort to improve the permitting process for new developments and home improvements. Mayor Craig Greenberg has also hired Pamela McKnight to be the city’s first Chief AI Officer. McKnight comes to Louisville after spending 30 years with the tech giant Intel, most recently as a senior program manager focused on AI adoption.
At a recent press conference, McKnight said the administration wants to make Louisville a leader in the AI space “in terms of government and public service.”
“That’s a great foundation to build on,” she said. “Enabling our employees is one of the most important things. We need to make sure that everyone is skilled, that they understand how to utilize AI in order to better serve the residents of the city.”
McKnight’s hiring and the permitting pilot project are part of a $2 million initiative by city officials to explore how artificial intelligence might improve local government services.
Louisville Metro is currently accepting proposals from AI companies in range of different areas, including:
While city officials hope new technologies can help make local government more efficient and responsive to residents’ needs, public opinion on AI is polarized. A recent poll by Pew Research found that half of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life.
The role of ‘AI slop’ in social media disinformation and humorous flubs by AI-assisted search engines are frequent news topics. Many Louisville residents have also expressed concerns about the expansion of hyperscale data centers to support AI infrastructure.
Greenberg told LPM News he thinks the key to using AI for good is “using it right.”
“Making sure that software doesn’t have parameters that allow it to be abusive and that people don’t use the software in the wrong ways,” he said. “To me, that’s no different than any other technology, like when we moved from typewriters to word processing online.”
The mayor said Metro Government will continuously update its internal policies for using AI as new programs and uses arise.
Greenberg and McKnight sat down with LPM News this week to talk about the city’s plan for utilizing artificial intelligence. An excerpt of that interview, edited for length and clarity, is below:
RR: Pam, Mayor Craig Greenberg said that your job is to see how artificial intelligence can make city processes more efficient. What does that look like in practice?
PM: Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of opportunities. Across the city, one of the key focuses for us initially will be our Govstream.ai pilot. That is really going to drive efficiency in our permitting process. That’s a big pain point for us from a development perspective and from a resident perspective. It’s definitely something that will drive efficiency by streamlining the intake, as well as streamline the back-and-forth between our planning office and our codes and regs group.
RR: And where does AI fit into that relationship between developers, or even residents wanting to do work on their home, and getting a permit and then talking with Codes and Regs?
PM: So, if you think about the permitting process today, a lot of times there’s inaccuracies in people’s design plans or in information, like if it’s a flood plain or where might be a historical district. AI can really help streamline that by being able to pull information from our city codes, as well as the geographic information system data and our mapping to be able to help in that space.
A great example would be, if I’m a resident and I want to put in a pool, it might be able to help you say, how far away from the property line do you need to be? And then that can help firm up their application and their design.
CG: We still want people making decisions. There need to be guardrails into how we use this. But if you look at things regarding permitting, you’ve got a 1,000-page document with all these provisions. What AI can do is it can take the plans and quickly go through that entire code book and give you feedback on whether you comply or not, so they can speed up the process.
RR: I think the guardrails that you mentioned is an important point. When I think of the permitting process, it’s a complicated legal process, developers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys and people to shepherd their projects through the process. It’s something that the city often gets sued about. So, how do you balance wanting to use new technologies with the importance of getting it right?
CG: Well, that’s why I think oversight is important: What parameters you set on what the technology is for and is not for, and then, ultimately, having people make the decisions is most important to me.
RR: And outside of the partnership with Govstream.ai for permitting, what other pilot programs is a city going to roll out initially?
PM: We had five categories. They are all public information. We have some things around redaction. We had some things around videoing and cameras, around potholes and things along those lines. So those are definitely areas that we’re still evaluating.
CG: There are also some areas where we can, internally, do our jobs better. We have 5,000 employees. We’re a large enterprise here at Louisville Metro Government. Our IT helpline gets over 100 calls a day from Louisville Metro Government employees. There are a lot of questions that are the same.
Public safety is something I’m interested in. Are there tools that we can use to improve our efficiency to make Louisville a safer city? This might be an area where the technology might not be there yet, but we’re certainly doing everything we can with drones, for example. That’s not really AI technology, but how can we use technology to make our city safer and are there tools out there?
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