The free courses are anticipated to roll out in May to the community, which can gain access via a Mesa library card. The city can do this with no additional cost to its budget by leveraging the LinkedIn Learning software that it’s already paying for.
“AI is becoming everything to everybody particularly from a productivity perspective,” said Scott Conn, chief information officer at the Feb. 9 study session. “Cities that invest early, it’s been proven already that it improves their service efficiency and we’re seeing that here as well.”
For over a year, about 50 employees, representing all city departments, have been testing the training.
The courses, 10 to 30 minutes long, are self-paced aimed at beginner, intermediate and advanced adult learners — including seniors, job seekers and entrepreneurs, according to Library Director Polly Bonnett.
“We want to provide free access to those high-demand skills that you can skill-build over time to be more competitive in the workforce,” she said. “We see ourselves as a pipeline into skilled trades and into the workforce in Mesa.”
The courses can be taken online or in-person through programs that the library will offer, according to Bonnett. The online courses will be anonymous.
“If you’re using these courses, we wouldn’t be able to track that back to a particular card holder but we can see how many views those courses receive,” Bonnett said.
Deputy CIO Harry Meier said they are looking at how the initial testers in the city are using AI in their jobs and also ensuring that resident data is protected.
“We recently polled that audience, did a survey of everybody who’s had access to the tools for the last year and came up with: What exactly are they looking for? What guidance do they need? What training is going to be useful for them? And what’s really needed to get the biggest bang for our buck out of these tools,” Meier said.
LinkedIn Learning has over 1,000 courses to choose from.
Meier pointed out that staff will vet all AI-generated information to ensure its accuracy, free of AI hallucinations.
Roll-out to all employees is expected in a month, starting with introductory AI essentials and safe-use classes, he added.
“Beyond that, we’ll also with engaging with the state’s AI committee,” Meier said.
“The governor set up a committee that is talking about this very topic of how AI will be used in local governments throughout the state.
“We’ll be engaging with that committee here in the coming month to talk through what we expect to see coming down from the state level - if there are any potential regulations or legislations that they’ll be talking about at that level.”
Ian Linssen, head of the Office of Innovation, reminded the council that the city already has an internal AI policy all employees must adhere to.
He also noted that because Mesa is the first in Arizona to do this, staff will be tracking the training.
“We want to see are folks interested in it, do they like it? How do they use it?” he said. “It’s anonymous but we do want to know if it’s working. If it’s not, we want to know why and maybe tweak it. But we think there’s going to be a lot of excitement around this once it gets rolled out.”
According to Conn, the city looked at multiple different training opportunities.
“There’s only one other city that I am aware of in the country that is doing this for their residents as well as staff and that’s San Jose, California,” he said.
“So we took a look at their model. They’re actually partnering with six or seven different training companies in Silicon Valley to offer this to their residents.
“We decided to go the less expensive way to make this happen and searched all of the available training that that we could offer for free and we pretty much just landed on LinkedIn Learning.”
Councilwoman Dorean Taylor asked if the city tracked the employee testers’ AI prompts — the instructions or input data provided to elicit output — and if so, what are the more common ones.
Linssen responded that the city was not monitoring that but rather creating a forum for employees to talk about what has worked and what hasn’t — which he said will be “really beneficial.”
Taylor also questioned if there are safeguards in place to protect data.
“Are we locking certain departments down to only have access through artificial intelligence to certain information?” she asked. “It can get pretty complicated from a security aspect. And then people leaving the city, what they have access to and there’s just so much to it.”
According to Conn, staff has outlined a multi-layer set of protections and strategy to deal with the issue Taylor raised.
“We are controlling who has access to what,” Conn said. “And we are ratcheting that down tighter and tighter and tighter.”
Councilwoman Jenn Duff asked at what point will the city be able to use AI instead of relying on studies, which Mesa spends a lot of money on and takes time to complete.
“AI sometimes can gather data from across departments and stuff and have a deeper dive into what’s going on right now in order to make decisions about streets or whatever,” Duff said. “Are we going down that pathway to start gathering our own data?
“Some cities are doing tremendous work especially around transportation … doing deep dives into crash analysis and being able to see through public safety records and then making recommendations.”
Linssen said what Duff was asking about are enterprise-use cases, which for now is “very expensive” and time-consuming to implement.
“But we are absolutely looking at it,” he said. “It’s definitely a direction we want to move in.”
Conn added that one of the pieces of low-hanging fruit is the data analytics capability.
“We have the data,” he said. “We are assuming it is good. We just need to run the analysis tools on it using AI and it will help us determine those things without the assistance of a consultant.
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