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Welcome to 玩偶姐姐 leadership live. I'm Lee Rennick, Vice President, Tech Evangelist for IDC, and I'm thrilled to be in San Jose with the 玩偶姐姐 of San Jose. Khaled Tawfik, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you. Thanks.

Could you introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about your role? Absolutely.

My name is Khaled. I'm the Chief Information Officer with the city of San Jose.

I've been here for about three years this April, and my role is really overseeing all the innovation technology in the city, making sure that we can be as effective as possible and responsive as we can to the serving to serving our community and providing services to the public.

Yeah, and

it's, it's a large community, it's a large tech community, right? So you've got a lot of businesses here that are supporting technology innovation. So I'm really excited to have you on this show. Thank you so much.

So I really first wanted to start off and learn about the GOV AI coalition that you founded in 2023 to promote responsible and purposeful AI in the public sector, I'd love to understand how it started, like how you incubated this idea. Was it through partnership?

And then what services and resources does it provide to the public, public agencies and maybe the private sector as well? Absolutely.

We founded the coalition about a year and a half ago with about nine cities founding members of the coalition.

And there are two concepts why the whole thing started reflecting in the last 2530 years of technology, we we adopted a lot of technologies, like the internet, social media, without really thinking or learning what will be the consequences.

And as a result, we have a lot of issues cybersecurity today. Right? We have issue with privacy. We have issue with transparency. And the list can, can is going day after day.

So we, if we thought about cybersecurity back in 2000 and if we implemented 1% more as far as the safeguarding the technology, we will then 10 times more better to today compared to what we've so the first concept was, if we can think what AI would look like in 2050 and we can take some measures today to make it safer, more secure and more transparent, I think that will make a big difference in the long run.

It just we need to start today. We cannot start 10 years from now, when it's too late, right? And the second concept is we have hundreds and hundreds of government agencies, and primarily we do the same thing, right?

And if it was challenging for a city of my size, San Jose, yeah, in the middle, in the heart of the capital of the world of Silicon Valley, yeah, and and we struggling with it because it's new and it's overwhelming.

I can only imagine smaller cities how they can deal with it, and what kind of resources they're lacking and funding and things like that.

So when I introduced this concept with couple my 玩偶姐姐s from government about a year and a half two years ago, I was really excited or pleased to see their commitment to join the coalition and to help us start the coalition.

So the coalition started about a year and a half ago. Today, we have like, 700 agencies and over 2000 members. And every month, we're getting more agencies and more members.

And the really, the advantage of it is the work can be done by a few of us and can be shared by the masses, right?

And last March, I believe, in 2024 we released our first AI policy for government, and as of today, we got adopted by more than 115 agencies.

Well, not only the policy was more matured from day one, because we had so many agencies working on it, yeah, but also saved hundreds of our development policies by just sharing and replicating.

So it's been really an overwhelming success for us, and we're really proud to be part of it and to be leading the initiative nationwide. Well, that's

that's hugely successful, and congratulations on that. And thank you probably for some of the smaller agencies having worked for, you know, smaller nonprofit agencies and things like that. In the past, they don't know how to approach any of this.

So when you have a smaller agency and you're providing that overall guidance that must be very impactful for them, absolutely.

And the feedback we've been getting from them is really overwhelming, and we're grateful for their participation and their support. The second part is, vendors don't think. What we're looking for.

So it's important for us to be upfront what direction we're taking when it comes to transparency, privacy, data and all the stuff.

So vendors are not developing solutions, in fact, and some of the recent hearing in House and Congress related to social social products and Tiktok and things like that. In a sense, we failed. We did not tell them.

We did not set the expectation for privacy right, and by the time we came back and said we wanted to be secured and private and all the stuff, it was too late, because they invested millions of dollars in development.

So that's also another advantage of the coalitions for us to have a united voice vendors, so they know where we're going, what we're looking for, and hopefully we can influence each other in developing that.

Yeah, we had our first summit, actually in this Convention Center last December, and hopefully this year we're gonna have our second summit, Delve, a coalition summit in November 5 of this year to keep this as an annual event. That is wonderful. Thank

you so much for sharing information about it, and we'll include some information in our in our post when we link online as well. That'd be great. So we have been at a IDC directions today. We're hearing a lot about innovation around agentic.

AI, just curious to what you might be seeing in market, how you're approaching it? Yeah, any specific approaches you're taking that you know helps to support your the city and also the coalition.

Absolutely, we have a committee in the coalition just for use cases where we we implementing or sharing experience and knowledge, and it doesn't make sense for each one of us to develop a solution in silo or vacuum, yeah.

So this year, we're definitely seeing a transition from being experimental with AI to being more purposeful in implementing AI in a structured, scalable scale. Yeah, some of the things we're looking at where we can take the AI solution to be to provide the solution end to end.

And certain things we're looking at, like translation, like drafting contracts or drafting grants and things like that. We're also looking at some of the core services we'll provide in the city.

For example, we manage 311 for the city, which is anyone that has issues with non emergency service, they can call 311 and we receive about 300,000 interactions with the public every year.

So we're looking at a pilot where we can detect and predict where the services will be needed. So we can be proactive in providing these services. We know that potholes don't develop overnight, right?

So if we can predict when the pothole will be, you know, conditions will be eroding where we need to service it.

If we can build that in into the service and the maintenance of roads, maybe this is going to be something easier for us to do in the long run, the same thing with graffiti and trash, and the more we can, the more we can use AI to detect, predict, yeah.

Then we have a better way of streamlining the process, where the public, we don't have to rely on the public to provide that feedback. It can be more effective that way, yeah.

And you can provide it in a way that's not necessarily someone picking up the phone, like I do, calling in, right? It can all be done online, moderated by that agent. And then, basically, you know that agent can instruct some outcomes, potentially and ideally something.

They say we already know about it. And here is what we're trying to plan to do to address this issue. Sounds very exciting.

That's amazing. Thank you so much. So we're just wrapped we've just wrapped up the first quarter of the year. Any thoughts on the remainder of the year? Anything you're looking at with the GOV AI coalition that you'll be working on to support the remainder of 2025

the first phase of the coalition of last year was focused on policy security and building the structure. Now we're looking at, how can we actually do the implementation? How can we share data? How can we come up with standards where we use our data to train AI models.

So instead of just using one data sets from the city, if we can make this accessible to everybody nationwide, then we have a deeper, wider range of data that we can make our models more effective and increase our accuracy. So these are some of the things.

And how can we learn from each other? How can we build something that is scalable so we can minimize the duplicate work and hopefully get everybody to be more effective and use AI in a more responsible and effective way.

Sounds like you've got an amazing plan mapped out for the year. Thank you for sharing that. So last question, we are at IDC Directions. We're in your hometown, San Jose. We're very pleased to be here. Thank you for having us here. Thank you.

Just wondering how events like this impact. You know, your own learning, your networking. Why you attend. It's

always exciting to meet, you know, partners from the from the public, from the private sector, from from the education, from research. And this is really events like this facilitate the conversation.

And we learn from each other and compare notes, and sometimes somebody is working with something that they were not paying attention to.

So it helps simulate the conversation, and, you know, trigger some of the thought provoking ideas that, you know, we go back to our offices and continue the partnership and the relationship to build would do with our topics. Wonderful.

Well, thank you so much for hosting us here in San Jose. Thank you for the event. Thanks. Khaled. My pleasure. You.