Overgrown grass. Trash strewn everywhere. D.C.’s Department of Buildings is constantly fielding complaints about the District’s thousands of vacant properties.
Each time someone complains, DOB discharges an inspector to take a look, something it’s done more than 11,400 times this past fiscal year alone. That’s in addition to thousands more inspections focused on poor conditions in occupied housing or external property maintenance at private, owner-occupied property.
“It puts us in a space where the public controls the amount of work we’re doing,” said Keith Parsons, DOB’s director of strategic enforcement. “[Complaints are] still super valuable and super helpful, but we do want to take ownership … and take some of the burden off of citizens.”
To become more proactive, DOB is one of many D.C. agencies considering using artificial intelligence. Specifically, it’s looking to contract a company that can take street photographs of property exteriors and use AI to determine where there may be housing code violations that need abatement. A lot of vacant properties look vacant to a car going by, Parsons noted.
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“We want AI to save us work,” he said. “It’s supposed to be helping us be more efficient.”
That is the approach being taken by administrators at many of the city’s agencies, in conjunction with a broad framework laid out by Mayor Muriel Bowser, that experts say could allow the District to become a leading city in implementing AI — helping it to stretch limited resources, automate tedious paperwork and generally speed up city services.
But given the speed with which the technology is evolving, some observers are noting potential concerns with adopting AI for city use — including the possibility of the technology displacing jobs currently performed by humans and the privacy concerns it could present for residents.
“We’ve been talking about the Mayor’s order on AI and making sure we move forward in conjunction with those values,” Parsons said.
In February 2024, Bowser signed an executive order that established ground rules for how District agencies adopt AI. The order detailed six core values — including privacy, equity and human accountability — that agencies must weigh before deploying AI tools. It also created a citywide AI task force and set a timeline requiring every D.C. agency to submit a formal strategic plan by October 2026, while giving the Office of the Chief Technology Officer broad authority to vet and approve new technology before deployment.
“What the mayor wants is really for the city itself to have that understanding and that awareness of how the technology is being utilized,” said Chris Rodriguez, the assistant city administrator whose office reviews any agency plans for using AI. “This is a new technology. This is something that a lot of cities are utilizing, and we wanted to make sure that there’s a governance structure in place to be able to implement it.”
The order makes D.C. an early leader on AI among cities, said Christopher Jordan, a program manager of AI and innovation at the National League of Cities. The District, he said, is one of the only cities nationwide to have mandated AI training for city employees and was early to issue guidelines.
While city agencies’ annual performance oversight filings to the D.C. Council aren’t exhaustive, they help illustrate how they are putting those guidelines into practice — or at least, how they’re preparing to.
‘We Don’t Expect AI to Answer a 911 Call’
Public safety and emergency response agencies are among those taking the most active steps.
D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department secured conditional approval for an intelligence platform that pulls together video feeds and license plate readers into a real-time hub. In line with the mayor’s order, MPD noted that AI-generated data is not used when officers conduct stops, searches or arrests, or while making use-of-force decisions.
Meanwhile, officials with the Office of Unified Communications — which manages D.C.’s 311 and 911 systems — say they are working on projects to route automated calls through an AI chatbot to generate dispatch events.
“The goal is to get the AI to answer the more routine service request and the calltaker is focused on the more complex ones,” said Gavin Suares, OUC’s chief information officer, adding that AI is being tested more extensively on 311 calls.
For 911 calls, AI has only been used for quality assurance checks. But Suares says the technology could have additional uses. “We don’t expect AI to answer a 911 call, but there are use cases: quality assurance, translation and transcription,” he said.
Oversight filings show that behind the scenes, some of D.C.’s operational and social services departments are turning to AI to tackle chronic efficiency challenges. The Department of Public Works plans to incorporate an AI-enabled waste sorting system into its overhauled Benning Road transfer station. The Department of Human Services said in oversight filings that officials are exploring AI upgrades to help fix the city’s SNAP benefit payment accuracy rate — an area in which D.C. lags behind, per federal data.
Officials from the city’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability suggested to the council that AI-powered software could be useful for agencies bogged down by heavy public records backlogs.
The District is also experimenting with integrating AI into routine aspects of local governance, having launched a free regional AI marketplace for job seekers and piloted a university-developed AI platform to facilitate large-scale policy discussions with residents.
Rodriguez says D.C. will be the second jurisdiction in the nation to use a government-specific version of Claude, the AI tool developed by Anthropic.
‘Nobody Can or Should Relax Here’
The District is well positioned to become a leader in AI adoption, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told The Washington Sun. The area is home to hundreds of AI startups and a well educated talent pool, and many companies are already implementing AI in their work.
But D.C. — which already has the highest unemployment rate in the country — will need to balance the economic opportunity AI could bring to its agencies with the potential for job displacement, Muro said.
“We haven’t really seen massive disruption yet, but that’s a question,” Muro said of AI-induced layoffs. “Nobody can or should relax here.”
Rodriguez stresses that he doesn’t see AI substituting for the work currently done by city workers. “It’s meant to assist,” he said. “It’s not meant to replace.”
The Department of Buildings wants to reduce the number of manned inspections of vacant property — one AI-assisted survey would do the work of 100,000 manned inspections — but the idea is to refocus those human workers on other areas like inspections of occupied property or illegal construction, Parsons said. And Suares noted that AI’s quality assurance checks on 311 and 911 calls would take 50 or 60 new human employees to handle.
But the widespread adoption of AI in city government raises privacy concerns. That’s especially the case in D.C. Public Schools, which has quietly rolled out AI tools for staff and students — including from Microsoft, one of its principal technology vendors. Some parents say they were never notified about the use of AI for kids, and are unclear what safeguards will be employed.
“One of the top concerns many parents have is how is our kids’ data being used? What accounts are being set up with very little parental notification or consent?” said Maya Mechenbier, a DCPS parent and leader of Schools Beyond Screens D.C. “Is there evidence for their use in schools? If there is a new platform that is supposed to help with kids’ reading, has that product been independently tested relative to a human approach?”
Earlier this month DCPS unveiled new guidelines on the use of technology in classrooms, and Mechenbier says school officials are now sharing lists of approved tools — including AI — and those still under consideration.
As for residents who don’t like the idea of having their homes photographed and run through AI programs, DOB points out that the agency does have jurisdiction over the exteriors of all private property in the District. What’s more, vehicles have long captured street view images of people and their homes, Parsons pointed out.
Still, concerns linger. Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) wrote in a letter to DOB he was worried about the initiative’s potential to “ensnare” property owners with excessive fees, “putting them on a path towards foreclosure.”
Another worry is that AI could target, and aggressively fine, those living in low-income communities. But Gavin Baum-Blake, the CEO of City Detect, a company that performs AI-assisted property inspections nationwide, said he ensures his software centers equity.
“It doesn’t look for beauty, it looks for things that are out of code,” he said. “A house that’s worth $70,000 that doesn’t have any issues is going to be rated the exact same as a $3 million house without any issues. That’s all that it’s looking for.”
D.C. residents have expressed excitement around improving public services and communication from the city, said Jordan, who also serves as a public member of D.C.’s Advisory Group on AI Values Alignment. But residents have certainly had questions, particularly about how AI will be deployed in schools, he said.
“Overall, I think there is a cautious optimism,” Jordan said. “When the public can see inside the city’s strategy and their intent, I think that it just creates a much better forum to have these conversations, rather than starting with distrust.”
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