Standing technology review rather than a project with a delivery date. From 2022 the vendors already in the estate began putting AI capability in front of the city, and someone had to say what it would mean here.
The work was assessment: what the tooling could actually do, where in a consolidated city-county estate it might fit, and what would have to be true first. Vendor briefings and capability reviews on one side, the estate as it actually stood on the other — 300-plus applications, two data centers, and obligations that do not bend.
Nothing was implemented, which is the honest description and not a caveat. The constraints in a government estate arrive before the capability does. Florida public records law reaches what a system holds regardless of how the system holds it, and a model that ingests records inherits the disclosure question rather than escaping it. Retention schedules govern the corpus, not just the file. A criminal justice boundary has a defined perimeter and data does not leave it because a feature is convenient. And a public body asked how a decision was reached has to be able to answer — which rules out any use where the answer would be that no one can say.
Most of the assessment was working out which of those questions had answers yet, vendor by vendor and use case by use case. Several had none in 2022 that would survive a records request or an audit. Saying so, with the reasoning written down, is what the review was for: a city that has already reasoned through the constraints can move quickly when the answers arrive, and a city that bought first would have been unwinding a procurement instead.
The pattern is the same one that runs through the rest of this record. The process gets designed before the product is fitted to it, because the reverse order is how organizations end up defending a tool instead of a decision.
Outcome
A defensible position on which use cases could clear records, retention and criminal justice constraints and which could not — arrived at before money was committed rather than after.