A Closer Look at California's Most Digital Cities – Part I

California is inextricably linked with the technology industry. It's the home of Silicon Valley, arguably the global center of artificial intelligence and technological innovation, so it’s only fitting that the local governments spread across the state would carry that torch in service of their constituents.

In this year’s Digital Cities Survey*, California cities made up nearly a quarter of those recognized for their innovation and service to the public. Of the 56 cities on this year’s list, 13 are from the Golden State.

Respondents to this survey highlighted several near-term priorities, including a focus on cybersecurity; customer experience; AI and machine learning; process automation; recovery and resilience; analytics and intelligence; data governance; workforce training and retention; agency collaboration; and modernization.

In honor of these recipients, we’ll look closer at their work in this three-part series. The following cities were recognized for within the 500,000 or more population category:

1st: San Diego

San Diego excelled at so much this year that it’s difficult to list it all. The city continued digitizing records, with its CIO partnering with the city clerk to create a playbook that helped speed up the process, making sure participants were using best practices, meeting records retention requirements and logging metadata for searchability. The team also created a web-based cost calculator, so city departments could work digitization into their budget projections. Ultimately, this digitization improved record access for both city staffers and the public.

Speaking of the public, San Diego also improved its digital engagement with projects such as new chatbots, online scheduling and a neighborhood crime dashboard. The chatbots were part of a large effort to embrace artificial intelligence, with the city also running a new generative AI pilot that first trained chatbots on all its website's top-searched pages, and next on administrative regulations and municipal code. San Diego then positioned itself to continue developing its AI work by establishing a new AI draft policy and budgeting $360,000 for AI pilots in 2025.

These are just some examples of the wins for San Diego, of course. The city also launched public dashboards with key departmental performance indicators, deployed automated license plate readers, implemented a new Security Operations Center to monitor cybersecurity after hours, enhanced its workforce planning, invested in digital equity and used tech to help ease an ongoing housing crisis. In this packed year, the housing work particularly stood out, with the city using digital transformation to reduce time needed to process building permits. As a result, San Diego issued more permits for new housing than any other year dating back to 2005. That’s just one tangible public good that came from an excellent year for the IT shop in San Diego.

2nd: Los Angeles

Los Angeles stays in the top tier of digital cities in the largest population category with a continued commitment to customer-centric, data-driven government. MyLA311 is the virtual front door to City Hall, which now connects residents to 84 different service request types across 11 city departments. It has facilitated more than 2.4 million contacts through the mobile app, call center and website, but it remains a work in progress: The service is still being updated and modernized with additional functionality.

To take advantage of the potential of artificial intelligence, Los Angeles has developed an AI Roadmap to train and equip employees. The city has developed five different AI training courses and published a new set of AI policies for employees and IT developers. L.A. is also developing a Vision AI tool with Amazon Web Services, as part of the MyLA311 app. The tool will allow residents to shoot a photo of a concern, and AI will populate the photo with vital information like category, location and more to help streamline the reporting process.

A new citywide data science platform and data lake offer analysts across L.A.’s many city departments an improved understanding of issues like homelessness, policing, demographics and more. The platform enables better collaboration among analysts and data scientists, who can now develop actionable insights more quickly.

The Cyber Risk Score and Cyber Risk Portal are helping educate the workforce on the latest threats and therefore reduce the city’s exposure to cyber vulnerabilities. These efforts have brought about a 40 percent decrease in clicks to a phishing exercise. On the infrastructure side, the city’s digital network is more resilient due to upgrades to the data firewalls at the Van Nuys Backup Data Center that position the city for future network growth.

2nd: San Jose

The city at the heart of Silicon Valley took second place in this year’s Digital Cities Survey, with one of its most notable efforts of late being its leadership in the artificial intelligence space. Indeed, San Jose set a policy that has served as a model for governments around the county, making it a driving force in how the rapidly evolving technology can be put to work for the public sector. The city-led GovAI Coalition, which is made up of more than 250 government agencies, serves as a guide for responsible public-sector AI adoption. Similarly, the city has been aggressive about finding use cases for the technology, including development of the Homeless Encampment Management System, real-time translation of city meetings in more than 40 languages, and the identification of potential road hazards.

Beyond AI, San Jose also displayed a firm grasp on its cybersecurity strategy, which includes a comprehensive road map, regional coordination and state-of-the-art emergency operations center, along with dedicated awareness and training campaigns for staff and the public. The city has also put significant resources toward closing the digital divide by expanding its community Wi-Fi program in underserved areas. The network includes more than 41,000 households that lacked critical access to the Internet.

9th: Sacramento

California’s capital city may not be thought of as an IT powerhouse like some of its nearby San Francisco Bay Area counterparts, but that may change if the city holds its current course. In this year’s Digital Cities Survey, Sacramento claimed a ninth-place spot in a population category that saw it competing with the likes of San Jose, Seattle and Boston. The city achieved this by taking on several initiatives to improve its operations through technology. In addition to sweeping upgrades of the 311 system infrastructure, a virtual agent has helped to reduce the strain on live agents by nearly 10 percent. Similarly, the city worked to update its legacy cashiering technology with a more modern and secure solution. The enterprise cashiering system reduces the risk of fraud and cybersecurity risks, allows for online payment processing and bolsters accurate revenue tracking.

Data is also playing an increasingly key role in operations. The Data and Analytics Office was launched in December to harness data streams throughout city departments for data-driven decision-making and efficiency. That team is currently working to develop a citywide data strategy.

Finally, like many other cities its size, Sacramento has a laser focus on addressing connectivity challenges. In July 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission awarded the city a $38.7 million grant to connect more than 43,000 underserved residents to high-speed Internet.

The national list of cities recognized in this year's survey can be found here.

*The Digital Cities Survey is conducted by the Center for Digital Government, part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — California's parent company.