When Asheville’s Assistant City Manager Ben Woody sits down to consider complex community feedback or the intricacies of development proposals, he’s rarely working by himself. Instead, he has been partnering with a digital twin: Gemini, Google’s generative artificial intelligence assistant.
On Asheville’s ongoing Anti-Displacement and Affordable Housing Project, for example, Gemini summarized the tangled strands of discussion that took place during a stakeholder workshop with at least 18 participating organizations. The AI has also compared development projects and helped Woody find specific points buried in lengthy academic reports.
“It’s pretty amazing how quickly it can synthesize data for you,” Woody said. “I find that it’s crazy accurate, and it does it so much faster. If I were an analyst, I would be worried about my future job.”
Like the city of Asheville, other local governments across Buncombe County have started to explore AI’s potential for supporting staff. In most cases, these efforts are still in the very early stages; most area municipalities don’t have formal public-facing policies for how AI can or should be used.
But as the public conversation around AI tools — and the often controversial data center infrastructure that supports them — continues to evolve, officials agree that they can’t ignore the quickly changing technological landscape.
Preparing for AI-sheville
Asheville is likely the furthest along when it comes to local government adoption of AI. The city has had a formal Generative AI Policy since May 2024, noted Holly Barham, Asheville’s director of information technology services. She said its language, which forbids uses like the covert collection of biometrics and “cognitive behavioral manipulation,” was based on the GovAI Coalition convened by the city of San José, California.
On July 2, Barham added, Asheville held the first meeting of its “AI Advocates Cohort.” Consisting of a few IT staffers and a representative from every city department, she said the group is meant to keep the city’s experiments secure while sharing best practices across the organization. (Public records of that meeting, including a summary and full transcript prepared by Gemini, are available here.)
Barham emphasized that Asheville’s use of AI remains “on a very small scale right now.” Individual staff like Woody have used the technology as a “thought partner,” and the city’s software developers employ it for coding help. She said the cohort will propose a more formal AI pilot project sometime in the next few months.
Although that project would measure return on investment and gains in operational efficiency, Barham said the city is not looking to AI as a way to cut staff.
An employee, she said, may “easily use AI to be more efficient, but it doesn’t mean that person won’t have a job anymore. It just means they’ll be able to get some other things done also.”
Asheville City Council hasn’t weighed in on the government’s internal use of AI; the city’s policy was approved at the staff level by former City Manager Debra Campbell. However, Council did vote unanimously in June to approve a one-year moratorium on data centers. Black Mountain, Weaverville and Woodfin have also all passed moratoria on data center development this year.
At the time, Asheville City Council member Maggie Ullman expressed general criticism of the technology. “We didn't spend decades building this amazing arts community, adding to our culture, having this amazing outdoor recreation, our small businesses, so we could become a warehouse district for AI. I don't want that future for us,’ she said. (Ullman did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.)
Barham suggested that conversations about the city’s own AI use should be separate from concerns about building its infrastructure in Asheville. “It's different to say we don't want to come in and use the natural resources of our community, as opposed to being able to use AI at the organization,” she said.
County lines
Asheville’s Buncombe County counterparts may be moving a bit more slowly on AI. Mark Goodwin, the county’s chief information security officer, pointed out that the county often handles personal data, such as medical and election records, that must be protected from release to outside computer systems. County policy emphasizes that AI tools must “comply with data security standards and do not compromise sensitive information.”
Multiple Buncombe departments, Goodwin said, have explicitly said they don’t want to incorporate AI in their work. “There’s been some fear of general human brain degradation, just people not thinking for themselves,” he explained. “Several leaders within the county have been very concerned that it’s just dumbing people down.”
But some parts of the county have begun using AI. Goodwin himself said he’s found it useful for digesting documents and answering questions about complicated federal regulations. The county’s communications and public engagement department received $40,000 in this year’s budget to invest in AI tools for fulfilling public records requests. In that case, Goodwin said, the county would host the software on its own servers to prevent leaks of sensitive information.
Goodwin and Rafael Baptista, Buncombe’s director of strategy and innovation, presented on the county’s work during last month’s brAIn Hub AI Summit at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Goodwin said that talk,titled “Having the Difficult Discussions Around AI in a Large Organization,” attracted interest from other local officials.
Setting a course
Those leading the county’s smaller municipalities also tell BPR that they’ve started to experiment with AI, mostly in small ways. The town managers of Biltmore Forest, Montreat, and Woodfin all said they’ve employed the technology for tasks like preparing meeting minutes or conducting policy research. (Richard Hicks, Black Mountain’s interim town manager, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Weaverville Town Manager Scottie Harris is the most enthusiastic of the small-town AI adopters. Beyond just using the technology for text, he’s had ChatGPT create advertising flyers for town events and job postings. He’s also used it to produce concept images for how regulatory tweaks might change the look of the town, allowing him to communicate visually with policymakers.
“Before I pay a consultant to come in and do a streetscape project, to tell me what a design would look like, I took a couple pictures of the street and put it into AI,” he explained. “I can at least kind of paint a picture of what that vision would look like if we did more outdoor dining, more social districting.”
The approach is not without pitfalls, Harris admitted: One recent AI-generated flyer listed the town’s address as Weaverville, California. “There’s still got to be a human element to it,” he said.
None of Buncombe’s smaller towns have a formal AI policy, but those who responded to BPR said they hoped to enact one by the end of the year. Kristi Nickodem, an assistant professor with the UNC School of Government who advises local governments on AI, said it’s important for municipalities to set clear rules for their internal use as soon as possible.
North Carolina’s current landscape is “a little bit of the Wild West,” Nickodem said, with no state laws specifically governing how cities and counties can use the technology. Municipalities have shown very different levels of risk tolerance and enthusiasm for AI adoption — and so have different employees within the same government.
“In many cases there’s this phenomenon of ‘shadow AI usage,’ where you have employees who are using it to perform day-to-day tasks, and the manager or governing board might not even be aware,” said Nickodem. “That really stresses the need for an overarching policy for how employees are going to use AI in their work, rather than assuming that people probably aren’t using it if it’s not officially condoned.”
