Miami-Dade County Officials Talk Putting AI into Action

On Monday, during the inaugural Southern Florida Digital Government Summit,* industry and government experts met in Miami to discuss how AI is being used across the county to streamline processes, deliver better services and grow its workforce.

Panel moderator and county Innovation Director Ana Chammas led the discussion among panelists, which included Margaret Brisbane, CIO of Miami-Dade County; Antonio Delgado, vice president of innovation and technology partnerships at Miami Dade College; Eileen Higgins, Miami-Dade County commissioner for District 5; and Matias Ruiz, general manager of state and local government customer success at Microsoft.

Here are some key takeaways from the discussion:

Miami-Dade County is defining its AI plans: “Being a part of the National Association of Counties, we sit on committees that focus on policies and procedures around many technology areas. AI was one of these core components that we started working on over a year ago. We spent months working with government CIOs across the United States to really come up with a document that government entities could use as a framework,” Brisbane said. However, “we weren’t depending on that report to drive our activities because Commissioner Higgins had a resolution that said AI was important, and so a report was issued to our commission that said, here is what our AI work will look like; we will focus on a workforce component, we’ll focus on governance and we’ll focus on use cases.” 

Small businesses can now benefit from AI courses: “We’re a small-business county; 80 percent of the businesses in Miami-Dade County have less than 10 employees. So, with the help of Miami Dade College, we have just launched this past month AI for operations courses specifically dedicated and focused on the needs of small businesses to see how they don’t fall behind either, because in our county, as small businesses fail, we end up with a lot of folks that don’t have jobs and access to opportunities,” Higgins said.   

Miami Dade College offers AI degrees for free: “We started developing courses without any prerequisites, [where] you don’t need to know calculus 3 or advanced statistics or advanced programming to start getting into artificial intelligence,” Delgado said. During this process, “We received $5 million to support Miami Dade College in providing scholarships for every resident in Miami Dade County to study AI for free.”

Now, these courses will soon be offered to public-sector employees to expand and grow the county’s workforce.

“We found InnovateUS, a nonprofit institution backed by Google, to help public-sector employees learn about artificial intelligence. Together, we are starting a pilot through [Miami-Dade County IT Department] to ensure everyone in the county can upskill and jump into artificial intelligence,” he said.

Miami-Dade County will soon launch its Pawfect Match app: “We were brainstorming and thinking about what’s a cool app we could use AI for, and (county CISO) Lars Schmekel said, 'What about an app that matches animals to owners,' and so the team came up with an app called Pawfect Match,” Brisbane explained. Essentially, the app uses AI to pair residents with pets based on specific criteria input by app users. According to Brisbane, the app will be launched in “another month or so.” 

Public-sector employees will soon have access to Copilot: By the end of the year, public-sector employees should have access to Microsoft 365 Government GCC, according to Ruiz. According to the company’s website, “Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) is a cloud platform that provides a secure and isolated environment for data used by the U.S. government, tribal governments and their partners.”

As a whole, “We really believe the empowerment these tools will bring to you is going to be a transformational shift in the way we work, live and become better citizens, better parents, better employees, so I’m very, very excited about this,” Ruiz said.
   
*The Southern Florida Digital Government Summit is presented by Government Technology, a publication of e.Republic, Industry Insider — Florida’s parent company.

Editor's note: This article has been corrected to show that Lars Schmekel was behind the Miami-Dade County pet-finding app.