San Francisco rolls out Microsoft's Copilot AI for 30,000 city workers

• San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced that generative artificial intelligence will be available to 30,000 workers across the city government.
• The city will use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o, for employees like nurses and social workers to improve city services.
• City hall said the move will make San Francisco one of the world's largest local governments to leverage AI.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Monday that generative artificial intelligence will be available to 30,000 workers across the city's government, leaning into the city's role as a leader in AI.

The city will use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o, for employees like nurses and social workers to improve city services.

“It's going to allow us to use LLMs and produce faster response times,” Lurie said.

Lurie's administration said the move will make San Francisco one of the world's largest local governments to leverage AI.

City hall said Copilot will be made across its departments to tackle administrative work like data analytics and drafting reports, giving workers more time to respond to residents.

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The move comes after a six-month test involving more than 2,000 city workers that showed generative AI gave them productivity gains of up to five hours weekly.

Lurie said the city used the 311 city services line as a test case that showed ways to improve service times for things like trash, homeless encampments and language translation.

“We have over 42 languages spoken here in San Francisco,” he said. “We don't always have enough translators to do all that. The AI tool is going to help us do that in seconds.”

While San Francisco is home to AI leaders from Anthropic to OpenAI and more, the city is relying on AI technology that will be available under its existing license with Microsoft, coming at no additional cost to the city, the mayor's office said.

Lurie said he wants San Francisco to be “a beacon for cities around the globe on how they use this technology, and we're going to show the way.”