Why Smart Cities Are Taking Their Time With AI?

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Thuong (Annie) Bui
October 13, 2025

If my earlier article on “manual Intelligence” captured the first phase of cautious beginnings, this next phase is about confidence.

Over the past few months, I’ve been circling back with several city IT leaders. This time we were talking less about tools and more about timing. Across dozens of conversations, there is another interesting pattern that is impossible to miss: slow is the new smart.

When Leaders Become Learners

One thing kept me up at night: “Everyone was designing training programs, but who were they really for?” In a few cities, I noticed something different. The answer wasn’t just staff. It was leadership too.
I’d like to call this leadership education “a hidden secret for effective change management.” In those cities, executives are not only approving pilots. They’re proactively joining them. City managers are sitting in training sessions. Finance directors are testing prompts. Mayors are asking their staff what the guardrails actually look like.

Those participations send a more powerful signal than any memo: curiosity is safe here. When leaders learn alongside their teams, it normalizes uncertainty and turns hesitation into dialogue.
As a CIO shared with me, “The moment our leadership started asking how instead of if, adoption stopped feeling risky.” That’s when they stopped fearing change and started owning it!

Winning the Users’ Buy-in, Not Just the Approval

However, even with strong leadership education and support, adoption still happens to one person at a time. Several CIOs admitted that a single person, either a hesitant employee or a skeptical department head, can stall an entire project. “You don’t need bureaucracy to slow things down,” one told me. “You just need fear.”

That’s why many cities are paying more attention to their people during the pilot’s rollout.
Some are offering “learning-by-doing” sessions where staff use AI tools to complete their own projects. Others are budgeting not just for software but for training time. They acknowledge that employees can’t learn efficiently while racing to meet daily deadlines.

In these cities, user buy-in has become the new measure of readiness. Adoption is more effective when people feel empowered, capable and safe.

Governance by Design, Policy by Learning

One mid-sized city CIO described an interesting model called “governance-by-design,” where policies are not binders on a shelf but features built into the system itself. For example, before rolling out Microsoft Copilot, their team mapped where sensitive data lived, created automatic tagging rules for privacy, and embedded those labels into their file structure. “It’s not that we love rules,” she said, “it’s that good rules make creativity safe.”

Another CIO took that idea one step further, what he called “policy-by-learning, not restriction.” Instead of trying to police AI use, his team partnered with a startup to see how employees were already experimenting with the tools. By observing real behavior first, they found the way to build guardrails within their system that made safe use easier for staff. “It’s like, if you start typing personal information into a prompt, it’ll stop you,” he explained. “What we don’t want to do is inhibit people from using it or make them afraid to try.”

He also emphasized the simple truth: “You can’t close the door on something people are already using. So, we learned from it instead.”

Networks as the New “Classrooms”

Fortunately, no city is navigating this alone. Without clear federal guidance, cities are turning to each other. Networks like the GovAI Coalition, Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC) and even InfraGard (an FBI-affiliated public–private group on cybersecurity) are emerging as the new backbone of AI governance. These peer communities share draft policies, vendor disclosures and lessons learned from early pilots.

One IT leader laughed about calling a colleague the day after a major rollout: “We asked what broke first, so we could fix it before it happened here.”

Another one genuinely told me, “The GovAI Coalition out of San Jose has probably taught us more than any federal document.”

These conversations may never make headlines, but they represent something remarkable: collective ethics in motion. Instead of waiting for top-down regulation, local governments are building horizontal trust, learning from and protecting one another.

The Future Is Not Arriving Faster

A year ago, readiness might have meant having the budget for a pilot or the license for a tool. Trustworthy data is still very important but now it’s more than that. It’s the leaders who can talk about risk without panic, the staff who feel empowered, and those peers who pick up the phone when you’re stuck. In this sense, readiness is less about technology and more about relationships between systems, departments and cities themselves. And it takes time.

As one CIO told me near the end of our chat, “Technology will always evolve faster than government. That’s fine. Our job isn’t to catch up. It’s to stay grounded.” Maybe that’s the real lesson of this moment: in a world obsessed with acceleration, the public sector’s greatest innovation might be its ability to slow down just enough to do things right.

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Author: Annie Bui is a Doctoral Candidate in Public Administration major, where her research focus on the integration of GenAI in Local Governments. She is the current President of Student Public Administration Association (SPAA) at University of La Verne. At the same time, she works for Small Business Development Center (SBDC), a non-profit organization funded by Small Business Administration, provides zero cost one-on-one consulting services to entrepreneurs for their new and existing businesses. As both a researcher and a practitioner, she committed not just to discussing theories but to actively seeking comprehensive resources that enhance our understanding of how to leverage this technology effectively in the public sector – a sector traditionally slower to adopt technology than the private sector. Her aim is to explore practical solutions that help public leaders to catch up with this fast-changing technology by being ready and proactive in adopting it. Her monthly article series will cover various topics related to GenAI in the current local government settings. Each article is designed to give government agencies the essential knowledge and tools to prepare for an effective and responsible GenAI adoption.

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