Before the mayor of San Jose, California, arrives at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new business, his aides ask ChatGPT to help draft some talking points.
“Elected officials do a tremendous amount of public speaking,” said Mayor Matt Mahan, whose recent itinerary has taken him from new restaurant and semiconductor startup openings to a festival of lowriding car culture.
Other politicians might be skittish admitting a chatbot co-wrote their speech or that it helped draft a $5.6 billion budget for the new fiscal year, but Mahan is trying to lead by example, pushing a growing number of the nearly 7,000 government workers running Silicon Valley’s biggest city to embrace artificial intelligence technology.
Mahan said adopting AI tools will eliminate drudge work and help the city better serve its roughly 1 million residents.
He’s hardly the only public or private sector executive directing an AI-or-bust strategy, though in some cases, workers