The City of Seattle is interviewing candidates for the position of City AI Officer to lead how artificial intelligence is used across departments and offices.
The new job coincides with the city’s recent release of a “Responsible AI Plan,” which provides guidance for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and support for the AI technology sector as an economic driver.
CAIO will report Rob LloydThe chief technology officer of the city Job postings It attracted 3,000 visits the first week it was live. Nine of about 40 highly qualified applicants are invited for interviews, with backgrounds from the private sector, federal government and academia.
Lloyd, who started as CTO last year, said the “very competitive” applicant pool also includes some former Microsoft employees. Should be renting one by next week.
“We have developed the City AI Plan [because] There’s a lot that can happen with AI to make an organization work,” Lloyd told GeekWire. “We’ve defined a few domains of activity that we need to be successful in.”
CAIO will manage those domains, including:
- Technical excellence and orchestration: The city’s AI plan ensures that infrastructure, programming, data and process engineering are aligned under an integrated strategy. Success depends on an “elite-level AI expert” overseeing the framework, technology and training, Lloyd said.
- Learning, Skills, and Responsible Adoption: With 39 departments, the city must develop a shared understanding of the use of AI. The focus is on preventing “AI product spillover” and aligning solutions with city priorities — such as aligning with budget directives and executive orders — while improving AI literacy, consistent terminology, and awareness of AI’s impact on workflows and people.
- Partnerships and Community Activation: The plan connects internal AI efforts with academia, startups and local organizations to strengthen Seattle’s AI ecosystem. Through collaboration and shared understanding of AI safety and innovation, the city improves both its capabilities and role as a responsible community partner, Lloyd said.
The use of AI has the potential to reshape how numerous city departments operate and serve residents. Lloyd points to adoption already at the Seattle Department of Transportation, where AI and game theory are being used to analyze areas with high crash rates and find patterns and anomalies in reports to help accelerate design options to engineer safer intersections.
Lloyd said public utilities, public safety and permitting are also ripe for AI disruption, but the approach is to augment human workers, not automate and displace them.
“There are plenty of places where we can see that workers are overwhelmed,” he said. “We’re not getting to the level of responsiveness that we hope for, and there are areas where we want to make smarter, even faster decisions. We can take AI and focus on those things, not to displace jobs, but to drive the level of service and decision making that we want to create.”
Seattle has taken the lead in developing guidelines for the use of AI and claims to be the first in the country to issue a generative AI policy in the fall of 2023.policyRequire “human-in-the-loop” oversight, where employees must review generative AI output before official use and attribute any AI-assisted work to specific technologies.
When it comes to new AI officers and AI plans, Lloyd emphasized the importance of making sure “we focus on our values and how we apply AI to the organization and community.”
Annual salary for the CAIO role is $125,000 to $188,000, according to the job posting.
Whoever lands the job will be joining a city government willing and able to work with a number of local “resources,” as Lloyd calls them, including the University of Washington, AI House, AI2, Plug & Play and more.
“We are the second largest hub of AI talent,” he said. “It would be a real shame if we didn’t take advantage of that opportunity and play to that strength.”