When you walk into the Dubuque County Courthouse, interacting with another person is practically a given.
Customer service is ingrained in county government. The people who answer your questions about property records or vehicle registration shouldn’t be replaced by artificial intelligence, county officials said — at least not in the near future.
The distant future is less certain. The county’s information technology director said that while an AI-operated courthouse might technically be possible someday, “we’re decades off.”
Everyone has a different perspective about the emerging technology. The one thing county officials seem to agree on is that, ready or not, AI is on its way — and the county is overdue for the conversation.
“There was a dot-com bubble in the ’90s where a lot of investment (went) into the internet and internet companies, and kind of the same with AI, you know — the investment’s there,” said Dubuque County Information Technology Director Jered Shipley. “I think as more use cases come out and software gets developed around that, I think it’s really going to take off after that.”
An efficiency tool
Dubuque County Treasurer Michael Clasen is already attuned to the possibilities of AI. He uses it “probably on a daily basis,” whether for personal or work purposes, he said.
“I think there’s opportunity within every department to utilize AI in some form,” Clasen said. “You just have to be careful about the risks in where’s that information going and where’s it collected and where’s it saved?”
Two years ago, Clasen attended a national treasurers’ conference where AI was a topic of conversation. Since then, he has mulled ways to leverage the technology in Dubuque County.
Clasen is specifically looking into using AI to automatically identify anomalies in office paperwork. He calls the idea “Project Transformer.”
“That would save so much time, effort and energy of one of my staff people,” Clasen said. “That would allow them to focus on helping constituents at the window versus there being a line.”
At the same time, Clasen said he doesn’t see AI threatening county jobs soon.
“It’s so early on in the process with AI that there’s no way that we have gotten to the point where AI could replace my staff,” Clasen said.
He does believe implementing AI tools would make the department more efficient. For example, his staff spend about two hours a day balancing cash registers in the courthouse.
“That’ll be something that I’ll certainly be looking at, like are there ways to reduce the amount of time that they spend doing that every day?” Clasen said.
For Hamad Dada and Johnny Stevenson, co-founders of Galena, Ill., business SoundSafe.ai, the technology is a given. AI is a tool just like a hammer, Stevenson said — something that makes work more efficient.
“I think the issue is the learning curve of how to use the tool,” he said.
Stevenson and Dada started off researching artificial intelligence as an “applied solution” for cities, businesses and defense. Now, they specialize in using AI to power deepfake detection and security services.
AI can also be used as a “preventative” tool because of its ability to correlate information and predict future issues before they happen, which could be useful for counties and cities, Dada said.
“By the end of the decade, I think we’re going to hit (a) 90% critical mass of everybody knowing that you have to have that,” Dada said of AI use. “It’s kind of like the mid-2000s where you’re like, you have to know computers (and) you get a computer in every kid’s hand. We’re going see that in the next five years.”
‘So much investment going into AI’
From an IT point of view, Shipley also sees the rise of the technology as unavoidable. The possibility of an AI-operated courthouse isn’t entirely out of the question in future years, he said.
“I think there’s opportunity for people to learn. If they learn AI, that might be beneficial in their job (and) it’ll be a force multiplier in that way. Instead of replacing you, it’ll just make you more efficient,” Shipley said. “But, I mean, the writing’s on the — there’s a reason why there’s so much investment going into AI. I think, eventually, as it gets better, it’ll be a matter of time.”
Shipley is working on forming an AI committee to craft a countywide policy. While the city of Dubuque has an AI policy, the county does not.
“If you use any of the public AI tools, they’ll store the prompts,” he said. “That data is used to train models, so without any safeguards, we could be unintentionally uploading sensitive information.”
That’s why a policy is important, Shipley said. He’s also working with Dubuque County Recorder Ann Sweeney to pilot an AI-operated auto-indexing system for documents in her office.
Like Clasen, Sweeney sees ways AI could streamline work for her staff.
“I think it’s an exciting technology that (offers) great promise, but we have to be really careful and deliberate about what we would be using it for and how —and how that affects employees,” Sweeney said. “(There’s) great anxiety around it but also great excitement.”
Still, Sweeney said there are complexities of government work that require human brain power.
“I think there’s just an expectation for most people that you’re going to have some human interaction that empathizes with your situation and asks the questions that you need (to) get to the bottom of some of the issues that people need help with or need some kind of assistance with through government,” she said.
Still need ‘people dealing with people’
That interaction is at the core of the debate around implementing AI technology.
Dubuque County Supervisor Wayne Kenniker said he doesn’t want to see the county automate services to the point where AI replaces people.
“We certainly don’t want to turn our courthouse into a bunch of kiosks where there’s no personal interaction,” Kenniker said. “We still need to have people dealing with people and not turn it into an electronic store.”
Dubuque County Attorney Scott Nelson agreed.
“People are fed up with bureaucracy,” Nelson said. “If you start allowing a machine to do that, oh my, people are not going to be happy.”
The county leaders haven’t publicly discussed its stance on the use of AI. Those conversations should be “purposely planned,” Kenniker said, rather than jumping into new technology.
“I think we need to start with some specifics rather than a general, ‘What can it do for us?’” he said. “I think we need to look at what we need it to do for us.”
During a county supervisors’ meeting in January, Kenniker brought up the idea of county officials using AI tools such as ChatGPT to streamline work. He had recently used the platform to summarize competing property tax proposals in the Iowa Legislature.
“I had one of my younger sons show me how to use ChatGPT, and we turned 160 pages into two summaries,” Kenniker said during that meeting. “It made it much more manageable and easier to get engaged.”
Ed Raber, the county’s planning and development director, said the supervisors could look into a license for extended ChatGPT use.
“Those summaries and asking it to compare, that’s an excellent use of AI,” Raber told Kenniker.
Other county officials aren’t as interested.
In the county attorney’s office, Nelson said he “forbids” AI use for legal purposes. Not only is AI unreliable when it comes to research or drafting legal briefs, “but it also breeds laziness,” Nelson said.
“There’s a big difference between efficiency and just being plain lazy, too,” he said. “That would be my contention: It’s not about efficiency — it’s about not wanting to do the work.”
That’s a detriment for lawyers in particular, Nelson said. He worries about AI “hallucinations,” or inaccurate results generated by the technology. An attorney could use AI to write a brief, and it might generate a legal citation that doesn’t exist, Nelson said.
“I shudder to think, you know, a judge using AI to find legal cases,” he said. “If a judge is using that and then ends up with a hallucinated case, where does that leave us?”
From the perspective of an AI company, Dada said he believes legal professionals will inevitably use the technology.
“Eventually, we’re going to start seeing more and more of the usage of (AI tools) spill over from the casual document or email AI use (to) using it in their dockets,” he said. “We’re still early, but we will see judicial usage of these tools, also with decisions, evidence or containerizing these things in real life — again, correlating what makes sense with a case or not.”
Government ‘slower to adopt’
County officials are also wary of contracting with an outside company for AI services. Doing so would have to make sense on several levels, including financially, Kenniker said.
“I think there has to be some working knowledge. I mean, yes, I messed around with ChatGPT,” Kenniker said. “Everybody’s going to have (a) different level of knowledge on it. I get the whole idea of hiring someone to come in and (provide AI services), but I struggle with that just a little bit. I think there’s some things that need to be done before we jump to that step.”
Dubuque County Supervisor Harley Pothoff is also hesitant.
“I mean, there are a lot of good applications for it, don’t get me wrong, but along with that (are) pros and cons to everything you do,” Pothoff said. “Could it remove some employees? Yeah, it’s a possibility, but do we really want to go down that road? I don’t know how much of a cost savings it’d be by the time you’re paying for the AI.”
One such company working with local governments is ValueBase, a North Carolina-based startup that offers AI-powered property valuation tools.
“It’s a more efficient, fair and equitable way to value — particularly residential real estate for property tax,” said Will Jarvis, the company’s founder and CEO. “We build better statistical models to do that.”
People are “quite interested” in those services, Jarvis said. Since founding the business in 2022, he works with 40 counties and cities across the U.S. and Canada.
Companies such as ValueBase reach out to Dubuque County Assessor Billie Selby, but he’s not itching to bring widespread AI use to his office. He isn’t worried that AI will take jobs, at least not in the near future.
“I don’t think that the tools are there to do that yet,” Selby said.
From Jarvis’ point of view, more counties and cities should utilize AI, “but government tends to be much slower to adopt these tools,” he said.
There is also a statewide effort in Iowa to consolidate and streamline local government. Chief among the recommendations in a state report is a call to “leverage AI for improved efficiency” at the county level.
Kenniker said he sees “some merit” to the idea, “but I think it has to be done at the right pace to make it effective,” he said. “In my eyes, it’s not something we want to make mistakes at and then have to fix it.”
Similarly, Dubuque County Supervisor Ann McDonough is cautious about suggestions to streamline county services with AI.
“It certainly sounds attractive,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want greater efficiency?”
But “shiny bright things” don’t always yield the results you want, McDonough said. She believes increased AI use could prompt the creation of a data center locally — something McDonough said she’s not in favor of.
Data centers house computer servers to store information for cloud-based software and to support AI expansion. Nearby in Grant County, Wis., a large group of residents has been voicing opposition after local leaders said a developer was considering building a data center there.
Shipley said he’s seeing 15% to 20% cost increases for computer storage and memory “because of the AI data centers that are being built.”
Even if you aren’t using AI, he said, “you’re affected by it through (the) hardware costs.”
Further, McDonough said, removing human interaction from county processes would disadvantage certain residents. While a computer-operated courthouse might not faze a 30-year-old, older adults who aren’t technology-minded could struggle to access necessary services.
“Government needs to work appropriately with all those different age groups,” she said.
McDonough said she believes that eventually AI use in Dubuque County “will be necessary in a positive way, (but) I don’t know in my lean government structure who I would ask to even keep me apprised of those things.”
As far as technological prowess, she said, “I don’t think you’re going to find that Dubuque County leads the state.”