Wentzville, Missouri, Assistant City Administrator Jessica Hoffman said she went all in with generative AI as a way to save time and money. Along the way, the 2024 Exemplary Public Service Award winner has also earned Wentzville, a city of roughly 49,000 people about 40 miles from St. Louis, a reputation as “a leader in municipal government technology adoption,” according to Kara Roberson, Wentzville strategic communications officer.
“Guided by her mantra, ‘work smarter, not harder,’ Jessica has turned a tool often met with apprehension into a catalyst for positive change, benefiting both staff and the community,” Roberson said. “By addressing concerns with transparency and highlighting the practical benefits of AI in personal and professional contexts, she has inspired employees to embrace the tool as a means to problem-solve, brainstorm and approach work with renewed creativity.”
Hoffman said Wentzville started using ChatGPT and Google Gemini at a time when nearly unprecedented growth was stretching the city’s resources.
“We call ourselves early adopters in Wentzville,” she said, explaining that the city administrator and the Board of Aldermen provide “a lot of leeway … to experiment. So when these tools started rolling out, we said, ‘Let's see how we can do this.’”
Hoffman started with the city’s key performance indicators, which she called dated and not particularly useful. She asked ChatGPT to compare Wentzville’s KPIs with the International City Management Association’s and recommend changes the city might make.
“They’re not perfect,” Hoffman said of the suggestions. “We still have a lot of work to do, but we were able to update them in, like, two days. Could we have done all of that by ourselves with the same data? Yes, we absolutely could have done that, but it would have taken us weeks, if not months, to get there.”
Hoffman has also used ChatGpT to review office correspondence when she was unsure if her approach was appropriate. “Instead of sitting on it for 24 hours, which was kind of the rule of thumb back in the day, I had [AI] review an email because I was frustrated with the person, but I didn't want it to sound too sassy, so I had it check my tone.”
Hoffman doesn’t advocate using AI for everything. “My terrible decision to try and do software coding took way too long since I had no idea what I was doing,” Hoffman said. “I would just use AI as a fast-forward button, but you should still be able to do/check/verify whatever you have [that] it creates.”
Hoffman’s AI push has met with plenty of resistance, and not always from where she would have expected. Whereas she might have assumed that resistance would result from generational differences, “people surprise me,” she said. “So, I try not to put that in a box.”
