The capabilities of the technology were laid out during a House Government Oversight Committee meeting on Tuesday, where lawmakers heard from Mark Welch of Tyler Technologies, which takes publicly accessible budget data and organizes it using AI through “priority-based” budgeting to allow spending comparisons between local governments and entities.
"We're able to go in and see, where's our process overlap? What are the services that we're providing? We have a lot of overlap, where are those opportunities to make improvements?" Welch told lawmakers.
House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, said he believes the company would provide lawmakers with information on local budgets across the state within four to six weeks of entering into a potential deal.
“This was just a meeting that I took, and I was very intrigued by the information that was being presented, and kind of led to the other steps,” Grassley said. “I left, you know, wanting to have transparency with government. It's something, since I've been appropriations chair, I've never felt we have enough information for us. But when they left that meeting, I was like, we need to at least continue this conversation.”
What would an AI budget analysis model look like?
Welch told lawmakers that the company’s AI model, developed over 12 years, could help county governments and school districts find cost savings and efficiencies by comparing their spending to peers across the state.
He said Tyler Technologies, which holds public sector contracts across the country, including the state of Arizona and the Alabama Department of Corrections, has saved millions of dollars in government spending by flagging parts of budgets that don’t align with the priorities of communities.
Welch highlighted the AI model’s ability to consider unique elements of counties and school districts, offering the example of the model taking a school district’s geography and size into consideration when looking at student transportation costs.
Data collected and analyzed would be made available through a dashboard for counties and school districts to view.
Republican Rep. Steve Holt, of Denison, called the company’s services “amazing,” adding it would provide budget information lawmakers have not previously had access to, including when he first joined the legislature.
“We really had no idea on the ground level, how this money was being spent,” Holt said. “It's just to be such an incredible insightful point we could be at in terms of how money's being spent, how we can improve things.”
Democratic Rep. Angel Ramirez, of Cedar Rapids, raised concerns that the model could inaccurately interpret the use of government spending for multiple social services, which usually rely on qualitative data to measure outcomes over quantitative data. She pointed to success rates in preventative social programs like therapy services, which are difficult to realize through budget analysis alone.
“My weariness comes from when we start comparing how effective, in terms of just how money saving is this program versus this one in a different county, but we're not getting into the full picture … what lives were impacted, what people were helped,” Ramirez said.
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