The city of Thomasville is implementing a new artificial intelligence tool for employees.
At a recent city council committee meeting, Deputy City Manager Eddie Bowling announced that all staff will soon have access to a program called GovAI.
Bowling said it will allow the city to fulfill Freedom of Information Act requests and monitor how the technology is being used. He said GovAI also lets them protect Personally Identifiable Information or PII.
“That could be an address, a name, Social Security number, date of birth, driver's license number. We house all of that information, and we don't want it accidentally released," Bowling said. "It'll send us a notification to leadership and say, hey, people were misusing the software and they're putting information out there. So we have a check and a balance.”
Unlike many other language learning models, GovAI isn’t trained with users' data.
Bowling said they hope to get 75% of staff using the program over the next six months and reduce the use of others like ChatGPT and Claude. Regardless, employees must disclose AI use in accordance with the city’s policy.
Thomasville will pay $24,000 a year for the program using insurance money from a cyberattack last year.