Trying AI 3 min read
Where should an AI rollout start?
Open access for everyone, then one department at a time. How to pick the first department, and a six-month plan.
Part of the path I’m ready to try AI
Both: open access for everyone from the start, then go deep with one department at a time. Broad access gives staff room to find where AI fits their work. Focused support, department by department, is what turns a login into everyday use. Most rollouts that stall did one without the other.
Two ways rollouts stall
The pilot that never ends. Limiting AI to a handful of people feels safe. It keeps AI feeling like an experiment and hides the staff who would have picked it up fastest. MIT’s Project NANDA found in its State of AI in Business 2025 report that 95% of enterprise AI pilots returned nothing measurable. A pilot can help you learn. The problem starts when the pilot becomes the whole plan.
Logins with no help. Handing out access isn’t enough on its own. Without examples from their own work, staff try AI once, don’t see how it fits, and go back to the old way. Generic training rarely fixes this, because people can’t connect it to the tasks on their desk.
What works: open access, then one department at a time
- Open it to everyone. Send out the approved tool with your rules, and tell staff from day one that AI is meant for the whole organization.
- Pick the first department. Choose one with work piling up and a leader willing to go first.
- Run a session on its own work. Use three or four tasks the team does every week as the examples.
- Choose one first job. Give it a clear owner and a person who checks the result.
- Share what worked. Have people from that department show colleagues elsewhere what they did.
- Move to the next department. Each one builds on what the last one learned.
Use can spread well past the first team. At a typical GovAI customer, nearly 20 departments are using it.
How to pick which department goes first
| Look for | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Work that’s piling up | Reports, notices, requests, or tickets the team can’t keep up with |
| A leader who’ll go first | Someone willing to use AI in real work and talk about it at a staff meeting |
| Results that are easy to check | Work where a person can quickly tell whether the draft is right |
| A job of its own | A task the department does that others don’t, like a clerk’s resolutions or a buyer’s solicitations |
IT and Communications are common first departments. Their work is heavy on reading and writing, and in GovAI they’re among the teams that use AI most. Procurement and the clerk’s office are strong second choices, because each has a job of its own that comes in every week.
A department-by-department plan for the first six months
| Month | Focus | What you should have by the end |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Open access, rules, and leaders going first | Every staff member has access. Two or three leaders have shared real examples. |
| 2 | First department: sessions and one first job | One job running with an owner and a reviewer. |
| 3 | Second department, with the first one showing what worked | Two jobs running. A short internal write-up of what the first team learned. |
| 4–5 | Third and fourth departments, plus answers from your own policies | Staff questions in one area answered from your own documents, with sources. |
| 6 | Review and report to council or leadership | A list of named jobs, owners, and what changed for each. |
Who helps you counts as much as the plan
The plan only works if someone helps each department get started. When you compare AI providers, look at what happens after the contract is signed:
- Will someone help us choose and set up our first jobs, or are we on our own?
- Do you work with each department on its own tasks, or offer one general training session?
- Do you understand how local government work happens, from council reports to records requests?
- Will you tell us when a job isn’t a good fit for AI?
- Who’s there when the fourth department starts, months after launch?
At GovAI, our local government experts coach your teams department by department as work goes live, and we’ll say no when a job is a bad fit.
Try this week
Score your departments on the four things in the table above. Pick the top one, and ask its leader whether they’ll go first. If they say yes, you have month two planned.