What does it mean to build "AI for good" in cities?

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That’s the question our founder and CEO Shannon Beckham tackled during a panel at this year’s Smart City Expo in New York City. Alongside Jake Porway of Decoded Futures and Harrison Marks of Commonweal Ventures, the group shared practical ways to build and scale responsible AI – drawing from their roles as entrepreneur, advisor, and investor.

Key Takeaway

The only way to modernize cities will be to embrace – not avoid – the advances we're seeing everyday in AI. To do this, city leaders need tactical strategies to explore, innovate, and test AI products in secure environments.

This was a key theme across the panel: the importance of balancing risk and innovation. From pilot programs to data governance frameworks, cities must be equipped with the tools to adopt AI safely and effectively. The future of "AI for good" depends not only on what we build – but how we build it. 

Tactical Actions

Here are three actions that city leaders and technologists can take today:

• Create more pilot partnerships between AI companies and cities, so products can be designed and tested hand-in-hand with the civil servants using them.

• Set up guardrails to ensure AI tools have clear data retention policies, abide by open records acts, and never use data to train third-party models.

• Design user experiences that keep the human in the loop as agentic AI accelerates, such as making recommendations for action and clearly marking when AI is used to generate output.

Real-World Examples

The panelists walked through real examples of their work where AI is positively impacting the public and social sectors in cities across the U.S. 

• ‍Chief AI: Chief AI helps government officials and their teams work more efficiently and strategically – automatically generating briefings, tracking relationships, and storing institutional knowledge in one place.

• ‍Decoded Futures: Decoded Futures worked with The Reading Institute to use AI to create free, decodable books for K-2 students – making early literacy resources more accessible to families nationwide.

• ‍Commonweal Ventures: Commonweal backs startups that use AI to reduce procurement delays, navigate climate tax credits, improve civic engagement, and more.

Let’s Talk

If you're building AI for the public good – or want to bring it to your city – we’d love to hear from you. Reach out here.

Note of Thanks

Thank you to Aarti Tandon and John Paul Farmer for leading this year’s Smart City Expo and driving innovation across cities. If you’re not familiar with the organization, learn more here.