Building an AI-Ready City Government

City leaders are eager to deploy AI, but the real opportunity lies in preparation: building the right organizational structures, expertise, and culture first.

Host Stephen Goldsmith speaks with Teddy Svoronos, senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, about how to structure your city government for Agentic AI, why small, empowered teams work better than broad rollouts, and what mental models and skills leaders actually need to manage this new relationship with AI tools.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why creating a data-driven culture before AI deployment is the critical first step
• How to start with a small, driven team to stress-test AI capabilities in your organization
• What "cognitive debt" means and why managing it prevents costly AI mistakes
• Why domain-specific expertise becomes more important, not less, as AI gets more powerful
• How to balance the tension between AI utility and maintaining organizational control
• What guardrails, monitoring, and evaluation mechanisms cities need in place from the start

Guest:

• Teddy Svoronos – Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Listener Survey: bit.ly/datasmartpod

Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa

About Data-Smart City Solutions

Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on LinkedIn.