DALLAS — Policy is crucial for building trust and ensuring guardrails for AI deployments, from reassuring employees that they aren’t being replaced to training them on keeping data secure and using various AI tools.
That was the message from Eric Matthews, Allen’s chief information officer, and others at the recent Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Digital Government Summit.* Matthews' team spent the past summer working on AI governance and building use cases. One question his team was regularly asked is how employee jobs will be affected.
“[It's] the kind of question that is natural for any new technologies, especially one that can be so productive as AI,” Matthews said. “The principles that were set down during that workshop we did … those principles were ethical, based around employees, based around people. [We’re] not using technology to replace people, but to augment — remember — augment, not replace, and that is the focus.”
The intent isn’t to suggest that the city will never adjust its hiring practices, but that it doesn’t intend to replace current employees with AI solutions. Framing it that way, the CIO added, shifts the conversation toward how AI can improve employees’ work and make their jobs easier, rather than fueling fears about job loss.
Matthews emphasized that communicating this clearly requires more than a discussion among departmental leadership. It needs to be codified in policy. Without that, employees and even members of a city council may have valid reasons for concern.
Across 60 larger counties and cities, he said that 25 percent had implemented AI projects, with many in beta and most tied to vendor technology stacks. The most prevalent are administrative, “helper-type tools” for document management, scheduling and customer relationship management. There is also adoption for knowledge management, such as policy creation, and public safety, as in predictive crime tools.
At the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), CIO Tim Howell shared that the group has recently completed its 2026 AI strategic plan. NCTCOG serves 16 counties and includes 230 member governments, according to the website.
“We do have an AI committee that focuses on the high-level direction. We have strategic priorities that we focus on: training, use cases, guidance and then security and compliance,” Howell said.
“We don’t get too much into individual projects or buckets. We just try to enable our agency by focusing on those big priorities,” he said. “And then we also identify department groups and grassroots projects, and we try to give them the resources to move forward because they’re going to know where AI fits into their jobs. They’re going to know how to use it the best for their role, and they’re going to know where they’re ready to use it.”
As to training, there are multiple approaches. For example, the cities of McKinney and Allen are requiring any end user requesting a Microsoft Copilot license to complete the associated training before being granted access, Matthews said. NCTCOG has a learning management system that can interact with vendor trainings and those built in-house, Howell said. They have also done lunch-and-learns and provided off-the-shelf training.
Matthews advised to “make sure your policies are done, in place and addressed, brought forth ahead of time to those people and to the organization, so that they’re aware and educated on what the dos and the don’ts are, where the guardrails are. If it’s in the policy, that will help the use cases move forward, which ultimately will get you to a successful production.”
*The Digital Government Summit is hosted by Government Technology, part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — Texas' parent company.
Local Gov CIOs: Successful AI Deployments Need Structure
Two local government IT leaders spoke in Dallas about what they are seeing on the AI front in North Texas and beyond. Deployments require buy-in, training and written policy.
