
Navigating AI in Local Government: Challenges, Opportunities, and Delivery
Local government today faces a perfect storm of challenges: chronic budget constraints, rising service demands, and public expectations that continue to grow. Yet amid these pressures, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging not only as a tool of optimisation, but as a pathway toward more resilient, equitable, and community-centered governance. In this article I present a structured overview of these themes. I begin with the pre-AI realities local government faced, then I examine the lessons from early pilots and experiments. Finally I discuss a roadmap for responsible and ethical implementation at scale.