New York Leverages AI for City Services, Security: Keynote at AI Summit New York

AI has a growing role in managing city services, especially in a large and complex city like New York. 

In his opening address at the AI Summit New York, Matthew Fraser, New York’s chief technology officer offered insight into AI's critical role in urban infrastructure, particularly in cybersecurity and public services.

He discussed NYC's AI strategy, which includes a municipal AI action plan and a generative AI policy, with collaboration from private sector partners like Google and Microsoft and highlighted the city's efforts to ensure transparency, accountability and equity in AI deployment.

Fraser began by emphasizing the importance of introducing AI from a human perspective in everything from cybersecurity and customer service to helping people improve their well-being.

To illustrate the scale of the operation from a cybersecurity perspective alone, Fraser said NYC sees more than  90 billion security events a week and uses artificial intelligence to break that down to fewer than 50 things humans need to deal with.

“The security mission is so massive that without AI, we wouldn't be able to keep New York City's tech space safe,” he said.

Fraser added that his team is turning to AI to handle tasks like power benefits access.

“Imagine being a family that needs access to public resources but you don't know what you're eligible for. We’re looking at AI to give people more, quicker access to benefits,” he said.

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NYC needs to collaborate with industrial partners to achieve its goals. The city recently launched the first municipal AI action plan in the United States, which included a generative AI policy. It also created a committee of public and private sector partners including Google, Cisco and Microsoft.

“As many of you may appreciate, AI is a term that's made it into everything from cyber to cars at this moment,” said Fraser. “For the city, we want to make sure that as we invest, we invest in a way that's smart and that covers the things that we need to do; we don't want to do technology for technology's sake. Leveraging our private sector partners helps rationalize where we invest.”

Fraser said that transparency and accountability take on additional importance in the civic space, particularly in a public-private collaborative environment, and that communication is key.

“Everything that we do from a technology perspective, we try to include the public in that process,” he said. “We have town halls to talk to the public about the things that we're doing and the ways that we're looking to implement technology. 

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“We have an Office of Information Privacy that's focused on setting policies that govern the use of public data and make sure that we're very transparent and we use that data in a way that's compliant with the public's use. And when something slips and it's not compliant, then we hold ourselves accountable.”

This article first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.