One year ago, New York City introduced a sweeping AI plan. Here’s how it’s going.

In a Q&A with Route Fifty, one of the architects of the city’s ambitious AI Action Plan discusses the process and challenges for ensuring the technology is used responsibly and ethically.

As states and cities wrestle for a leadership role in artificial intelligence, New York City made one of the biggest splashes last year as it unveiled its sweeping AI Action Plan.

The ambitious roadmap laid out 37 “key actions” to be taken across a range of areas, 29 of which had to be started or completed within 12 months. Those actions include establishing an AI governance framework, creating an external advisory body, and engaging with the public and city employees.

The rollout hasn’t been without its issues. Most notably, the city garnered negative headlines earlier this year following the launch of its much-vaunted MyCity chatbot. The bot was supposed to give New Yorkers information on starting and operating a business. Instead, it told bosses that they could take workers’ tips and landlords that they could discriminate based on source of income. Those issues have since been resolved, according to officials.

“No surprise,” New York City Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser said this week during the Google Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. “When you do anything that's new, you will get some feedback.”

But despite some hiccups, city officials say they are on track or ahead of schedule to meet the goals laid out in their action plan. In fact, they said, they are already looking ahead to how AI can help in areas like procurement, and how to get every agency fully up to speed on the role the technology can play to help their work.

Route Fifty sat down recently with Alex Foard, executive director for research and collaboration at the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation and one of the action plan’s lead architects, to look back and to talk about what comes next for the city and its AI efforts.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Route Fifty: How have the last 12 months been since the unveiling of the AI Action Plan?

New York City Office of Technology and Innovation Executive Director for Research and Collaboration Alex Foard | Photo courtesy of New York City Office of Technology and Innovation

Alex Foard: It's been great. We really wanted to focus on a couple of different things. We wanted to be clear that the city can and should be using AI. It’s something that we've been doing for a long time, something that we think can really add value and improve the way that agencies are doing business and serving New Yorkers. The second component is that we do think that we need to be using AI safely and responsibly, and so we want to be able to commit to building out the framework and the structures that we need to make sure that responsible use is the approach.

We also wanted to focus on the opportunity to be constructive and intentional with our steps, and focus on real, concrete actions instead of just abstract thinking. That's how we landed on what we did. When you look at the 37 actions that we have in the action plan over seven different initiatives, it really reflects a wide range of commitments for the city. We are focusing on building out those or taking on those initiatives that we've laid out for ourselves. Of the 37 key actions, we had committed to at least initiate, if not complete, 29 of them within the year. We are on track to slightly beat that target, so we're pleased with that progress.

We've been able to highlight a couple of different areas and really make some progress on governance, building out some of our initial policy, building out our internal AI steering committee, which is helping to advise on policymaking and other decisions for the city's AI. We’ve been able to hold some public engagement sessions, chatting with New Yorkers about their AI priorities, and hearing from them what they think about some of the work that we've been doing. We've been able to build out a lot of the technical resources that we need to be able to better support agencies in their work.

We've been thinking a lot about skill building for city workers, how we are equipping city employees to be able to work with AI tools and understand the role that AI tools play, but also thinking a lot around the procurement support or the in-house development support that agencies may need to help them think through bringing AI tools online.

It's been a busy year. We have a lot of work still ahead of us, but we're really happy with the progress that we've made.

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Route Fifty: Has it been challenging? It's a lot of boxes to check. How do you go about tackling something like that when you give yourself a big to-do list?

Foard: We're looking to create a meaningful sequence of steps that the city can take to help support this work. In many ways, we build upon each step as we go. As we do more analysis to help us understand, for example, where skills gaps may be needed in the workforce, we can then say to ourselves, “What resources do we currently have available? What additional resources do we then need?” It is a lot of plates spinning, certainly, at a given time, but there's very much a sense of a unified theme across all of the work that we're doing, and that helps to keep us targeted and oriented around the outputs for individual actions and then the overall objectives for the plan.

Route Fifty: What do you know now about AI that you didn't know 12 months ago?

Foard: Well, it may not be so much what we didn't know. I think we definitely…