The Center for Public Sector AI (CPSAI) and the Center for Digital Government is excited to build on our Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit for state and local government! We are convening state and local government CIOs and AI Leaders along with our private sector partners. The explosion of artificial intelligence is transforming government operations. As government grapples with how to harness AI’s benefits while minimizing its risks, CIOs need to build trust across multiple stakeholders; navigate ethical, security and privacy concerns; upskill staff to deliver with new technologies; and change long-held processes and practices. The Summit is an action-packed opportunity to engage with AI Leaders who are leading the way in leveraging AI as a strategic asset at the state, local, department, and agency levels. The goal of the Summit is to create a friendly and engaging environment to build and foster relationships with your peers and the private sector thought leaders. Venue Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach 21500 Pacific Coast Highway Huntington Beach, CA 92648 More details to come!

As AI evolves from generative tools to agentic systems, governance models must keep pace. Building on foundational efforts in 2024 & 2025, this session explores how state and local leaders are moving beyond point-in-time AI guidance and policies to living, interoperable frameworks aligned with cybersecurity, data governance, and enterprise risk management. Learn practical approaches for updating AI guidance, measuring effectiveness over time, and sharing best practices across jurisdictions to support resilient, coordinated AI adoption in your state and across the nation.

The most politically charged AI conversation in government isn't about technology, it's about people's jobs. This session tackles how CIOs can partner with HR to get ahead of the skilling and displacement conversation, shape the progression from compliance to competence, and build the internal coalition needed before the unions and elected officials demand one.

AI risk is not an IT problem or a security and risk management problem, but all simultaneously. Recent advances with AI have highlighted new capabilities and risks. Traditional staffing, tools, processes, and relationships are out of synch. Federal regulators, insurance providers, auditors, and bond issuers are emphasizing the speed and scale of impact of risks must be addressed and differently. This session will have a presenter show OpenClaw and Mythos risks, and we’ll examine how CIOs, CISOs, AI Officers, Privacy Officers, and Innovation Officers jointly build an accountability and execution model. The goal: develop shared visibility and support an approach for unified risk management model that can be sustained with elected and appointed leaders under a “secure, resilient, and adaptive” mandate true to the reality of looming cyber disasters.

Introducing a structured approach to AI maturity shows an organization is building capabilities beyond pilots— e.g., foundational data hygiene, ability to change processes with new approaches and technologies, focused investment funds, adoption and support of solutions and platforms that are proving themselves, eliminating what doesn’t work. Organizations are also identifying how to map the budget/finance directions and have the accompanying conversation to make AI less chaotic and performative, and more impactful and sustainable. In parallel are critical security, responsible/privacy, and cost controls. We’ll review the continuums AI Council members have developed, the Centers, and learn from each other’s progress on AI maturity.

The year-end session combines the themes of value delivery, engagement, and sharing best initiatives in 2026 from the Council. A pre-meeting poll will go out to AI Council members asking for their best projects and our meeting will highlight a small number from members from the perspectives of major performance impact, improved decisions, higher responsiveness, and trust-keeping. The AI Council will review AI value and impact models in use, as well as best communications and engagement approaches to be effective with the breadth of organizations and leadership. How are investments matching priorities and measuring impacts? What engagement models are building community trust rather than showing simple compliance with regard to AI governance?