Just ask Jamil Niazi, who’s been the chief information officer for the city of 320,000 since October 2023. He’s guiding Stockton’s 52-member IT team through a host of changes, which he outlined in a recent wide-ranging interview with Industry Insider — California.
A GOVERNMENT ON THE MOVE
Stockton’s municipal government is in the midst of a move to a new city hall. That means tech infrastructure, cabling, switches, furniture, the whole nine yards. “So we're hoping by end of the year, we could have our first City Council meeting there,” Niazi said. “The rough cabling, the fiber — those things are done. We have our equipment here already. The switch has been sitting here. We already pre-configured them. Furniture is ordered. We have to be out of this building by June.”
If the new city hall isn’t ready by then, though, that could force the city into a “double move” — vacating the old city hall and moving operations elsewhere until the new one is ready. One can only imagine the complex logistics that would entail.
MAKING WAVES WITH DATA
Niazi’s tech team is gearing up to fully launch data center disaster recovery and business backup operations on the Nautilus Data Technologies barge in the port. “We got the lease started and we finally got our key cards access there,” Niazi said. “We got our data backup appliance and our network switch, so that's exciting.”
San Joaquin County has used a floating data center for backup and disaster recovery for a few years; now the city is on board, as well.
AI IN GOVERNMENT
The city has been using OpenAI’s Operator tool, which uses artificial intelligence to streamline and automate municipal operations, including everything from recreation to sanitation to law enforcement.
“Now we want use cases for the pools, like when you want to check on a website — how crowded is the pool?” Niazi said. “How many people got tickets for 3 o'clock? Tell me what was the most crowded time?” OpenAI is the operator for it; that's a use case.
Another use case is for it to go and pull data from our IT cybersecurity dashboard, like phishing email statistics. … We started to use it, but you have to buy more licenses to use it, and departmentwide, it's kind of expensive.
Illegal dumping is also a problem for Stockton, and Niazi has trained his AI sights on that as well. He presented some of the city’s successes at a recent conference of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC), where he serves on the cybersecurity subcommittee.
“I was on an AI panel and at the MISAC conference, and I did a presentation on using AI facial recognition technology to prevent illegal dumping. We just finished a pilot: It reads your license plate, everything in real time. But let's say there's a really huge one [dumping incident] that caused damage, and then you could just look at it, and it tells you, OK, this car came in here, this is the kind of stuff we think was dumped, here are the people. And it gives audio, like when people drive up: ‘Hey, police are on the way, security is on the way.’”
Niazi is quoted as saying on the OpenAI website, “As we learn more about Operator during its research preview, we'll be better equipped to identify ways that AI can make civic engagement even easier for our residents.”
USING COPILOT
The city has some of the licenses it needs to incorporate Microsoft’s Copilot tool into municipal operations.
“We got our license … so we have Copilot there in a mix, because we're Office 365, Outlook email, and then for some other customized stuff we have Operator. We're investing also in technology to protect our data from AI, too. So working with Cisco, they have a new technology out that checks: ‘This person is using this AI app, and your data is leaving.’”
And on the issue of cybersecurity, the city is also in the vanguard of tech.
“We did a tabletop exercise with the FBI, and that was really successful — the city manager was there, and all department heads and a few people from fire, the chiefs, and also PD, and we ran the tabletop exercise,” he said. “They ran it for us, Homeland Security. And then the FBI gave a talk that was really helpful, successful, high-level stuff.” That tied in with Niazi’s activities on the MISAC cybersecurity subcommittee and his work as part of the San Jose-based GovAI Coalition.
MAPPING THE FUTURE
Niazi said he’s committed to helping departments throughout city hall with tech. (Niazi was featured in an Industry Insider One-on-One interview in April 2024.)
“Our police chief is doing a great job cleaning up things, and our fire chief also. Public Works, Fire and PD, all are really super busy. We give them the tools, leveraging AI where we can to help them prevent accidents, different things like that. And we're using GIS for different mappings. Like, where are the fire zones? GIS layers could help with that super quick. Or traffic studies, traffic calming. Another one on our GIS team is working on which areas could be used for cannabis sales, and all that. Our GIS team does great stuff like that.”
VENDOR RELATIONS
In addition to Microsoft and OpenAI, Niazi said he’s always on the lookout for solutions that could help the city.
“We're always looking to improve, and we don't want to be tied just to one technology,” he said. “But at the same time, we don't want to reinvent the wheel. We're in dialog with Google, and Google has a lot of great stuff with AI and also cybersecurity defense using AI technologies, just like Microsoft does. And then also, you know, Cisco, but we also get approached by IBM, you know, for Watson, things like that. But I want to concentrate basically with Google, because they get a lot of data. One of the things I'm looking at is that they have this product called Mandiant for cyber defense. We want to add that, and then also a lot of penetration testing to make sure we're really secure while we're doing this.”
EXPANDING THE TEAM
“When I got here, we had [IT] vacancies, so when we filled those, then I was able to request more from the city manager and then the council,” he said. “That got approved, so I was able to fill in. This year, I'm asking for a few more — and I actually back it up and show data, like the support level for cybersecurity, network support, as well as moving offices. So we need help desk, user support and project management when there are a lot of projects.”
