How do we choose the first job for AI?

Pick a job only your team does, that one person owns, that arrives every week, and that someone already reviews. Emails and rewrites get everyone started. The job that earns a second year of budget is usually the department’s own, like a clerk’s resolutions or a buyer’s solicitations.

Every team starts with the same four asks

Across 41 teams using GovAI, the same four requests sit in the top eight for 39 to 41 of them: rewriting for tone, restructuring a document, proofreading, and drafting emails.

Those are good first steps. They build the habit and they need no setup. They’re also a weak case for budget. When council asks what AI did for the organization, “people’s emails got friendlier” won’t carry the conversation.

Then each team finds a job that’s its own

Compared with the average team, some departments ask for one kind of help far more often. Clerks ask for help drafting resolutions and bylaws about 12 times as often. Legal asks for help drafting contracts about 11 times as often. Procurement asks for help drafting solicitations about 10 times as often, and for translation about 8 times as often.

Those jobs have something in common. Each has a known format, a deadline, a source document to start from, and a person who already signs off. That’s the shape of a good first job.

Source: GovAI requests from US and Canadian local governments, all time to August 2026, including free-tier use. Shares describe what staff using GovAI ask for.

Why the first job carries extra weight in local government

In local government, a first project that fails becomes a story people repeat. The first job AI does is the one council hears about, the union asks about, and the next department uses to decide whether to try. It needs to be visible, checkable, and owned by someone respected.

It also needs to fit a small team. If the job needs three new people to set up, it isn’t a first job.

Score your candidate jobs

List five jobs your department does. Score each from 1 to 3 on these six questions. Copy the table into a spreadsheet if that’s easier.

Question	1	3
How often does this job come in?	A few times a year	Every week or more
Who owns it today?	Nobody in particular	One named person
Do we have the source material?	We’d have to find or create it	Last year’s version, a template, or the specs are on hand
Who checks the result?	No one checks it now	Someone already reviews every one
How far behind are we on it?	We keep up fine	It’s a known backlog
Would people notice if it moved faster?	Only the person doing it	Residents, council, or other departments

A score of 15 or more is a strong first job. Below 10, keep it for later.

A solicitation, start to finish

Take a procurement team writing a request for proposals for janitorial services. Today, the buyer opens last year’s RFP, the department’s notes, and the current insurance requirements, and rebuilds the document by hand over a few days.

Gather the inputs. Last year’s RFP, the department’s list of changes, and the current insurance and compliance language.
First pass. The buyer asks AI to draft the scope of work from the department’s notes, update dates and quantities, and list every place the new requirements differ from last year’s.
Evaluation criteria. AI drafts scoring criteria from the scope, using the format the team already uses.
Review. The contracts administrator reviews the draft against policy and the legal language. Nothing in the insurance or compliance sections goes out without that check.
Plain-language check. AI flags anything a small local vendor might misread, before the RFP is posted.

Our model estimates about 17 minutes of by-hand work GovAI takes on per Procurement request, on average. For Legal, it’s about 26 minutes. Across a team that drafts solicitations every week, that adds up to real hours, and the contracts administrator spends those hours on the review instead of the retyping.

Modeled estimate, based on how complex each request is, using GovAI requests from September 2025 to August 2026. It’s a model, not a measurement at any one organization.

Good first jobs in other departments

Clerk: drafting resolutions and bylaws from a template and the council direction
Finance: comparing a proposed budget with the adopted one and explaining what changed
IT: turning a dense security advisory into a plain-language note for staff
HR: drafting job descriptions and interview questions from an existing role
Communications: rewriting a council report as a notice for residents

What to leave for later

A job with no clear owner, or one where a mistake would be hard to catch. A job that depends on a system you’d need to connect first. And anything where a wrong answer reaches a resident before a person sees it. Those can come once the team trusts the review step.

Try this week

Score five jobs with the table above. Bring the top two to your next leadership meeting, with the owner and the reviewer named for each. That’s your first job, and a backup.

Once you’ve picked it, the next question is how to make it run the same way every time: How do we turn an AI idea into a real workflow?