1st Alameda County, Calif.
Alameda County, a regular Digital Counties leader, put its tech workers on the front line last fall to make sure elections — including recalls of the district attorney and Oakland mayor, and the implementation of youth voting for school board seats — remained honest and safe. The county’s Information Technology Department (ITD) set up port security devices to guard the election network and increased its cybersecurity defenses to combat deepfakes and the spread of misinformation. That included round-the-clock monitoring of social media and the quick deployment of credible information to fight off lies. The focus on cybersecurity extended to a multiagency “tabletop exercise” to prepare officials for cyber attacks, social unrest and weather-related events — indeed, high winds and fire danger resulted in the closing of a voting center during the election, requiring the quick deployment of backup systems, a situation that underscores the importance of such preparation.
As all that happened, ITD continued work on replacing the assessor’s 20-year-old mainframe legacy system, a two-year project. And in another modernization effort, ITD held an “AI Hackathon” that involved 120 employees from 19 agencies. The event produced nine solutions, and the winning AI app was put into development.
Accessibility also stands as a priority for ITD. The county, in collaboration with Siteimprove, has launched a multiphase project to build and maintain accessible websites for people with disabilities. The first phase made the county’s property tax payment portal fully accessible, with more work to come.
2nd Fairfax County, Va.
Fairfax County has prioritized data governance to improve the user experience for residents. The county’s data-driven strategy of governing has also shaped its approach to AI.
In a similar vein, the county issued guidelines for generative AI use in March 2024. The AI initiatives the county has launched prioritize data quality and governance, and they developed data retention policies to support the advance of these technologies. All county employees underwent training to support adherence to related policies. The AI policies guide various implementations of the technology. Enhanced cloud architecture supports advances in AI services, such as an internal chatbot deployed in September 2024. The county is also adding AI in its 911 center to automate non-emergency calls and to provide real-time transcription for 911 operators. The Real Time Crime Center is also using AI and machine learning, enabling real-time location data access to support officers on the ground.
The county recognizes that its ability to integrate disparate data sources and make continuous advances in technology governance comes from having a skilled workforce. Staff training opportunities include data and AI literacy and cybersecurity, the latter of which helps the county adhere to its 2024 road map for cybersecurity excellence in an evolving threat landscape.
2nd Orange County, Fla.
Orange County, Fla., home to Orlando, jumps to second place in this year’s survey thanks to investments in AI, cybersecurity and digital equity, as well as updates to systems countywide. In extensive AI work, an internal AI system now streamlines access to historical data, leading to more informed decision-making. The county has deployed robotic process automation to perform tasks like the re-entry of some 45,000 invoices into the county’s finance system, saving 7,500 hours of work annually. These same technologies were introduced into numerous tasks like change-order forms for procurement, and AI is also used to perform tasks like pre-construction reviews, commissioner briefings and more.
AI has also been introduced into the county’s cybersecurity framework, helping to perform enhanced threat detection and response, and the Sheriff’s Office uses the technology to power video analysis. By 2026, the county will have implemented AI to improve facilities management, predicting maintenance before it is needed.
Information Systems and Services (ISS) partnered with the Orange County Corrections Department and local health providers to develop technology to help support a “medication-assisted treatment” clinic to assist with drug treatment services. These interventions with hundreds of inmates have helped contribute to a 25 percent reduction in opioid overdoses across the county. Meanwhile, TechCare, a cloud-based medical records application, was introduced into the county’s correctional facilities, helping to streamline the delivery and management of care.
Video surveillance cameras across fire stations, correctional facilities, the utilities department and the convention center were upgraded to ensure enhanced monitoring, cyber resilience and access control. The county has adopted multifactor authentication, as well as a client-less virtual private network to improve its cybersecurity resiliency. ISS also collaborated with CentralSquare Technologies and the Orange County Fire Rescue Department to upgrade the computer-aided dispatch system to include GPS mapping. And the county invested in digital equity, connecting more than 1,300 households to high-speed Internet. A partnership with the Aeras Foundation enabled the distribution of Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
3rd San Diego County, Calif.
One of the largest counties in the nation, San Diego has more than 3.3 million residents and is using cloud and artificial intelligence, implementing niche tools, and modernizing its traditional systems to serve a diverse population in a unique landscape. County Technology Office priorities include simplified, improved public access; digital equity and inclusion; stronger engagement with residents, businesses and government; community safety and well-being; and better information access and transparency.
The county website has been undergoing accessibility testing — both manual and automated — to ensure it is up to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. AI is helping rewrite website content, so subject matter experts can work faster, and it trains authors in a Web Content Basics class. For residents and end users, the website offers a multilingual public health system with an updated vaccination appointment option, modern child support appointment management, online child abuse reporting, and enhanced veteran housing data. There have been public safety enhancements including a new application for Sheriff’s Office hiring, real-time monitoring for juvenile detention, and electronic discovery for the public defender. And a board-level AI committee and Microsoft Copilot help staff test AI responsibly. More than 200 employees are in the Copilot pilot, and the county’s IT Academy and web content training reach hundreds more each year. These steps help equip staff and, in turn, keep residents connected.
To advance broadband and digital equity, the county is expanding Internet access to more than 1,000 remote households and replacing outdated copper lines with Starlink for remote fire stations and parks. Technology improvements for safety include AI-powered wildfire detection cameras, precise evacuation zones built on Genasys EVAC and upgraded safety notifications. These improvements tie into a need to respond across varied terrain and varied infrastructure.
4th Fulton County, Ga.
Fulton County, Ga., has been making waves in recent months, transforming how it serves more than 1 million residents. Over the past year, the county has expanded its digital footprint by developing 16 new applications, including a tool to automate eviction court check-ins, and a web-based eviction intervention dashboard that connects at-risk tenants with legal and financial aid. To ease backlogs, Fulton County also launched a case management system for the district attorney’s office and used AI to help transcribe court proceedings.
On the cybersecurity front, the county introduced phishing simulations and launched a new security operations center for proactive threat monitoring. The department of information technology also rolled out a data governance program and built a digital twin of its fiber network, giving the county a bird’s-eye view of infrastructure needs.
Fulton County’s digital services have also gotten an upgrade. The IT department deployed an enterprise virtual assistant for HR-related tasks and updated the county’s main website to better meet accessibility standards and user needs. With tech becoming an increasingly central part of its operations, the county’s recent efforts reflect a bigger push to future-proof how government gets things done.
5th Miami-Dade County, Fla.
Miami-Dade County jumps to fifth place in this year’s Digital Counties Survey, advancing a countywide artificial intelligence program with valuable results. Led by the Information Technology Department, AI has enhanced operational efficiency and public service delivery. In cybersecurity alone, AI and machine learning now streamline response to more than 2 billion monthly threat events, filtering them down to just 300 requiring human review and 50 needing manual intervention. On top of reducing workload by 99.999 percent, it has improved response times and system resilience.
Beyond cybersecurity, AI is embedded across numerous county functions. Chatbots in human resources and legislative research have expedited staff inquiries and reduced staff burdens. The Sherriff’s Office uses it for document management and forensic analysis. Some generative AI tools have demonstrated creative uses, like the Pawfect Match pet adoption assistant and the Extreme Heat Where Assistant, using AI and geospatial data to help residents locate cooling zones and heat-related resources.
Internally, AI helps with document management and automating business processes. To ensure ethical use, the county established an advisory council with experts in security, privacy and technology. To engage the community in testing and gather feedback, they’ve launched a beta lab with public-facing use cases and developed a countywide AI survey.
AI also supports larger strategy in Miami-Dade, especially the mayor’s No Wrong Door initiative, by powering more seamless and personalized customer interactions with county services across platforms. Partnerships with Florida International University help ensure staff aren’t left behind in these changes, with FIU supporting internal AI upskilling.
6th San Bernardino County, Calif.
San Bernardino County took a sixth-place spot in this year’s Digital Counties awards, joining two other California jurisdictions in the survey’s largest population category. The Southern California county has taken a strategic approach to its technology initiatives under the leadership of CIO Lynn Fyhrlund, focusing on enhancing service delivery, bolstering efficiencies and reducing costs wherever possible. To enhance services, the county has created a Business Relationship Management division and improved its CRM systems to build out its analytics capabilities through Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Like many regional governments, San Bernardino County is also working to leverage artificial intelligence to maximize operational impacts. The Innovation and Technology Department introduced GitHub Copilot within its Solutions Development team to build applications more quickly, with a reported 30 percent reduction in project timelines as well as minimized code errors. In a similar vein, the Wordly translation platform has been deployed for real-time translations during board meetings.
The county has also embraced drone innovations and policy work through the San Bernardino International Airport UAS Center, which has helped to standardize the governance framework for departments interested in using drone technology. This initiative also includes the use of Esri’s GIS platform to digest aerial data-gathering work. An enterprise agreement with Esri ensures that all departments with a need for this data have unrestricted access.
Data has also played a big role in the county’s response to homelessness. GIS technology and the data it enables have been implemented across the annual point-in-time count of unsheltered and sheltered homeless populations. This has been especially useful when it comes to targeting outreach and volunteer efforts.
San Bernardino County has also made significant headway in protecting its valuable networks from bad actors. In 2024, the Countywide Information Security Program expanded and now includes a Threat Intelligence team to monitor and counter incoming threats. The county has also beefed up its phishing simulation program to include progressive models to test employee awareness. And after nearly a decade of planning, the county headquarters was moved from San Bernardino to Colton, offering staff a state-of-the-art facility and better access to tech talent.
7th Wake County, N.C.
Wake County took seventh place this year with a focus on digital inclusion and technological improvements for both residents and employees. The county leaned into digital inclusion efforts with the introduction of a formal digital inclusion plan, highlighting resident needs and gaps in the digital divide, as well as community partners who can help address them. The next step is to attain funding to establish a framework for implementing the digital inclusion plan. But the county isn’t waiting to start working on closing the digital divide. Wake County has partnered with area Internet service providers to use grant funding to deploy broadband infrastructure to unserved areas. More than 4,160 sites are expected to be online by October 2026, representing a total investment of more than $17 million.
Wake County also took note of the increasing popularity of generative AI, publishing guidelines for county use of the technology and establishing a small AI working group. Members, some of whom are also part of the GovAI Coalition, meet to discuss ideas, resources and use cases for AI in the county’s work. Additionally, the county has a larger AI-focused group for employees, called the AI Community Meetup, that serves to enhance AI learning and ensure responsible use.
A new human capital management system is also improving things for employees, streamlining timekeeping while improving accuracy, efficiency and compliance. Similar improvements were realized through the creation of the Information Technology Advisory Committee, a cross-department collaboration to evaluate technology requests before purchasing. This has improved decision-making, resource allocation and alignment with county priorities around technology procurement. On the citizen-facing side, Wake County used StoryMaps to create 22 immersive mobile tours of local parks and preserves. Each tour, accessed on a user’s mobile device via QR code, has text, visual, audio and sensory features as well as Spanish translation capabilities, making them accessible to a wide range of visitors.
8th Cook County, Ill.
Cook County, Ill., is the nation’s second most populous county, serving more than 5 million residents. High on its priority list this year is establishing policies on the responsible, ethical use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help serve its large, diverse community. In the meantime, IT leaders have a full slate of cross-agency projects underway, many of which stemmed from a regular coordination meeting between CIOs of the county’s various departments. Examples include a new cross-departmental payment platform that’s both more efficient and a better experience for residents. GIS-powered upgrades for Cook County include CookViewer 3.0, a robust property information portal honed through several months of beta testing, and a medical examiner case archive dashboard. The county demonstrates its commitment to equity with a cross-platform website translation tool, and infrastructure upgrades have boosted Wi-Fi and therefore productivity across several county court facilities.
Ongoing IT workforce development efforts are showing results. Refreshed job descriptions and more competitive compensation packages are luring more private-sector talent and adding capacity overall for the Bureau of Technology. Part of the credit for this progress goes to Cook County’s strategic moves to add people with technical understanding into the hiring and onboarding process.
8th Hennepin County, Minn.
Hennepin County is, like many local governments, working hard to do as much as possible with limited resources. For its part, IT embraces tools to help with project management and prioritization, financial sustainability, and uses existing solutions, often augmented by AI. To help address the 400 requests for IT services from across county agencies, in 2024 the department implemented a data-driven framework to help prioritize projects, scoring them based on “business readiness” and “technology alignment.” Similarly, in the past year, the Information Risk and Governance Team has put together a questionnaire to help assess vendor risk, allowing the county to make data-informed decisions when selecting its partners. The team makes sure every area of the county government completes a risk assessment every three to five years, and IT has doubled down on staff cybersecurity training in the past 18 months.
In other data work, the county has implemented a new dashboard to provide an enterprise view of spending on software as well as infrastructure, and 2024 saw the completion of a three-year development of an integrated data system that brings together 1.4TB of data. Insights from that work are helping county agencies work in closer coordination to provide services.
Innovative projects in Hennepin include installing two VR machines in county jails to provide skills training (like welding, plumbing and HVAC) for residents, part of a program that aims to get detainees skills they can use to find jobs and reduce recidivism. A 2024 project with neighboring Ramsey County identified and mapped areas of high risk during severe heat waves, and a new dashboard tracks Hennepin’s progress toward a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030, like those saved through employees working remotely.
9th Maricopa County, Ariz.
Maricopa County lands in ninth place this year, taking steps to modernize the foundational pieces upon which to build innovation. Enterprise Technology (ET), the county’s largest IT department, has a 2025 budget of $154 million. To ensure its alignment with county priorities and fiscal responsibility, officials stood up reporting dashboards through Microsoft Power BI for easy access to budget status, spending, tracking and forecasting — and achieved $6.5 million in cost avoidance.
ET delivered a Business Value Report to demonstrate what has been accomplished in IT and offer quantifiable outcomes of its efforts. Implementing Bizzdesign's Horizzon tool in 2024 provided a clear framework to bridge innovation and execution, aligning business and IT strategies and facilitating digital transformation. And in 2024, the county updated its 20-year-old IT governance policy, aligned with supervisorial priorities, and created a department CIO Council that meets monthly to consider policy, opportunities and the direction of IT.
ET stood up a data classification policy and solution in December, a big step toward better protecting the data of a 14,000-employee government. The department’s cyber insurance provider recently increased the county’s coverage amount at no additional cost.
And the county’s Division of Epidemiology and Informatics teamed with ET to evaluate data needs and future tech demands — ultimately creating a data lakehouse platform to enable modernizing core technology, improving data processing and surveillance, and standing up a data governance framework. ET is facilitating partnerships with Internet service providers, backed by $34.6 million in funding, to advance broadband countywide, including in metropolitan Phoenix.
10th Palm Beach County, Fla.
In recent years, Palm Beach County has completed quite a few projects to improve foundational technology. That includes recent efforts to improve cybersecurity via multifactor authentication on desktops, centralized enterprise system logs via a security information and event management data lake, baked-in cyber advancements in low-code and no-code workflow automation tools, and an upgrade to the core financial application.
But the county is also working on evaluating, testing and deploying more cutting-edge technology as well, with AI and robotic process automation a part of its strategic vision for IT. It has already used AI to write personalized narratives for shelter animals, increasing adoption rates while cutting staff work time. Other use cases include improving cybersecurity through automated quality assurance processes and application security testing, streamlining invoicing and payments, automating claim intake, detecting fraud and misuse, deploying computer vision to assist in inventory tracking, and processing both structured and unstructured data to produce better insights.
Sitting on Florida’s Eastern coast and a frequent site for hurricanes, Palm Beach County is making strides in resilience, disaster recovery and continuity of operations. In 2024 the county deployed supercomputing resources with up to 48 terabytes of memory with self-healing capabilities, leading to faster application response times and a better ability to persist through emergencies. Enterprise-grade uninterruptible power supply in the emergency operations center eliminated single points of failure, while the Climate Risk Assessment and Action Plan is leading the county toward identifying strategies for adaptation and hazard mitigation, as well as means of improving infrastructure, land-use planning, emergency preparedness and public health initiatives.
Click here to see all winners in this year's survey.
