Dear Neighbor,
These days, AI is everywhere. It’s in our pockets, in our cars, in our social media feeds – heck, I think it might even be in my toaster.
Some compare the moment we’re living in right now to the 1990s – when the
dot-com boom was just beginning. Others say it’s more like 1760, the start of the industrial revolution. Some view AI as a revolutionary tool for progress, others worry about widespread job loss.
What we can all agree on is this — AI is here. And here’s the thing: we have an opportunity to do better for people than we have in past technological revolutions.
During the Industrial Revolution, we optimized for output, not people. We didn’t build in labor or safety protections early — so we effectively forced millions of men, women, and children into 12–16 hour factory shifts (six days per week) in hazardous mills and mines, where industrial accidents became so common that by 1900 nearly one in every 26 U.S. industrial workers was injured on the job each year — many maimed for life — and more than 18% of the entire workforce was under the
age of 16.
During the dot-com boom and the move toward globalized trade, we focused on financial performance more than people. Without a national, holistic strategy for managing this transition, millions of farming and manufacturing jobs disappeared, Main Street shops were displaced by big box stores, thousands of local newspapers shuttered and much more happened (good and bad) without the investments in early STEM education, mid-career reskilling, apprenticeships, broadband access, and industrial policy that could have ensured more people shared in the wealth
that was generated.
We can learn from past technological transitions to inform how we approach current ones. And while we can’t and shouldn’t try to stop AI from being adopted (not only is it inevitable, but it will provide many benefits), we should harness it for maximum public good and do our utmost to anticipate negative impacts and get ahead of them.
Instead of fearing the worst while simply letting history take its course, San José is proactively embracing the AI trend and attempting to shape it for shared prosperity. No technology transition is easy or without impacts, but we can influence how it plays out.
As you may remember from past newsletters, we’re already beginning to harness AI at City Hall to make all of our local bus routes faster, fix potholes before they damage your car, provide real-time language translation at public meetings, and streamline permitting so we can get housing built faster.
We’re also upskilling our City Hall workforce. In less than a year, our first two cohorts of AI-trained city workers have saved between 10,000 and 20,000 staff hours and $50,000 in consulting costs. Given these early successes, we’re expanding to achieve a goal of training more than 1,000 employees — 15% of our workforce — by the end of 2026. We’re one of the first major cities to roll out AI training at this scale (thanks to SJSU for helping develop the curriculum), and we hope our approach serves as a model for others.
We’re helping our city employees understand and use these new tools in a way that makes their lives better and makes government work better. By automating mundane tasks, we can empower people to focus on the creative, collaborative, and uniquely human tasks that draw people to public service in the first place. And this week, we announced a first-in-the-world partnership with three of the leading AI companies that call our region home. This partnership will allow every resident of San José to access the AI tools that are increasingly changing how we learn, work and engage with our world. Access is free and the partnership includes both online, self-guided training and future in-person training in our libraries.
It may not be a national retraining strategy, but it is a program that can be replicated in other cities across the nation. I want to thank the Bay Area Council, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for partnering with the City of San José and understanding that this is our moment to get AI right for this generation and the next. You can try out these tools for yourself right here.
