When a delivery worker hears about new e-bike regulations, they shouldn’t have to rely on social media to understand them. Instead, they should be able to ask City Hall, “What are the new rules? How do they affect me?” and receive an immediate answer in the language they know best.
That is just one of many ways artificial intelligence could help us better understand our government.
When New York City’s AI Action Plan was published in 2023, it rightly emphasized governance, accountability, and responsible deployment. As the new administration updates that work, it should give more attention to the public-facing side of AI.
A parent who’s curious about a proposed school rezoning probably won’t start with a planning document. Someone wondering why a neighborhood improvement has stalled is unlikely to read through an environmental review. Spend one minute reading Community Board minutes, and you’ll run into a wall of acronyms: ULURP. CEQR. HPD. EDC. BSA.
So what’s the point of government transparency if people still can’t decipher the information it produces?
New York has spent years putting more information online — budgets, land-use applications, public hearings. But access and comprehension are not the same thing. Publishing a 200-page PDF makes information technically public while leaving most people without a practical way to understand what it means for them.
For generations, journalists, neighborhood associations, and advocacy groups have helped interpret that information. Those explanations, though, are written for a broad audience. People often need answers specific to their own questions and circumstances.
That gap is also an equity issue. People who know how government works, have time to dig through documents, or speak the language in which they’re written have a much easier time finding what they need than those who don’t.
AI now gives government a way to tailor the same underlying information to each person’s question and level of familiarity while pointing everyone back to the same source.
Tools like Smith & Moses now make it possible to follow activity in the New York State Legislature without reading every bill or legislative update. BetaNYC has launched a suite of AI tools aimed at making public data easier to access, alongside AI literacy classes across the five boroughs. Singapore has deployed AI assistants across dozens of government agencies to help residents access public services and information.
Most telling is how everyday New Yorkers are vibecoding their own interfaces to public information. One example is What’s Happening on My Block?, which turns fragmented city data into a simple brief about what’s happening in someone’s neighborhood. Its creator, Reynaldo Muñiz, is already considering the next step: letting residents query that same information in natural language.
As these tools improve, that kind of interaction may become something people expect from City Hall. But the higher the expectations, the higher the stakes.
New York tested this idea with the MyCity Chatbot, which showed both the appeal of asking government questions in plain language and the risks when those answers are wrong or misleading. Any system that follows should make clear where each answer comes from by tracing it back to an authoritative source.
The Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation could establish a citywide standard requiring every significant public action to include a plain-language explanation alongside the public record — one residents can ask questions about, not just read. Every answer would link directly back to the official documents behind it, keeping the public record as the only source of truth without compromising its integrity.
At a minimum, every explanation should answer these questions: What changed and why? How does it affect me? What should I do next? Where can I learn more? It should also be able to answer the questions that follow.
The official documents wouldn’t change, but the starting point would. Residents could begin with the question they actually have, then open the official document behind the answer and dive deeper whenever they wanted more detail.
Whether the City is releasing a budget, publishing an environmental review or announcing a rule change, the same principle should apply, with the official record remaining exactly as it is today.
Open government only works if people can act on what’s made public. If someone shows up at a Community Board meeting because they finally understood the agenda, or realizes a proposed rule affects their business, the system is doing what it was supposed to do.