AI Commission Meeting - July 29, 2025: AI Roadmap, Training, and Final Report Review
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AI Commission Meeting - July 29, 2025: AI Roadmap, Training, and Final Report Review
On July 29, 2025, at approximately 5:30 p.m., the AI Commission for Marion County Indianapolis convened to hear updates on the city's AI initiative, review training progress, and discuss the final draft of the commission's report. The meeting included a presentation by Chief Digital Officer Kate Coten, detailed discussions on data privacy, workforce training, and future AI deployment, followed by a review of the commission's final report.
Discussion Items
- AI Roadmap and Foundational Updates: Kate Coten presented the progress of the AI in Indy initiative. Completed items included a SharePoint site audit and permission access, a generative AI policy passed by the IT board and published on July 29, 2025, and a security framework proof of concept with Microsoft Purview (data loss prevention) expected to conclude by end of August 2025. The hiring of a Chief Data and Privacy Officer remains pending; a data manager role is being created instead.
- Education and Engagement: Over 300 employees expressed interest in the InnovateUs Google certificate program (data analysis, cybersecurity, project management); 150 licenses were secured and all filled within an hour. The program kicked off in July 2025. A pre-pilot of M365 Copilot with 39 ISA staff is underway, using a four-week cohort model with weekly themes (meeting management, task management, analysis, content creation). Early survey results showed high satisfaction with meeting management and analysis use cases, while task management had mixed feedback.
- Training Completion Numbers: As of July 25, 2025, 126 employees completed the InnovateUs generative AI training (100% increase from May), and 284 completed data classification training (139% increase). Only 119 of 200 expected Copilot license holders are fully eligible due to training prerequisites.
- Phase Two Planning: Copilot Chat (for all 7,700 Office 365 users) is planned for October 2025 with a half-day training. Agentic AI Copilot is not yet cleared for government GCC tenant; planning is ongoing but may be delayed to 2026.
- Data Privacy and Policy Concerns: Commissioner Emmert raised privacy risks of agentic AI learning from uploaded data. Coten clarified that the generative AI policy prohibits uploading sensitive data to non-approved tools and that Microsoft Copilot within the tenant does not train on user data. The policy is reviewed by legal and will be updated as needed.
- Final Report Discussion: Director Colin Hill presented the draft final report, which incorporates all commission recommendations. Key changes include added recommendations for an AI governance committee (subcommittee of IT board) and an emerging technology fund. The report will be public upon finalization. Commissioners requested adding links to previous presentations, an executive summary upfront, and more detail on financial impact and return on investment. A two-week comment period was agreed upon.
Key Outcomes
- Deadline for Commissioner Comments: All feedback on the final report draft must be submitted by August 8, 2025, via email to Director Hill, Amrit, and Councilor Pierce.
- Next Meeting: Another in-person meeting will be scheduled in late August/early September 2025 to formally vote on the final report. The meeting will be held during budget season, possibly piggybacking on a short committee meeting.
- Policy and Governance: The commission endorsed the creation of an AI governance committee and an innovation fund as recommendations. The report will be presented to the full City-County Council after final approval.
Meeting Transcript
I'm gonna call this meeting in order. This is uh the meeting of the AI Commission for Marion County Indianapolis. Today is July 29th. It's approximately 5 30 p.m. And we're gonna get started first with introductions of our commission members. Starting to my left, Mr. Hill. Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Colin Hill, Chief Information Officer for Indianapolis and Mary and County County and Director of ISA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Elliot Patrick. I am the Chief Operating Officer at Bell Tech Logics. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Michael Paul Hart. I'm the minority leader on the council and vice chairman of this commission. Hi, I'm Abby Homan, President of Site Strategies Advisory. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Tasha Phelps and I own Felco Technologies and a member of the Commission. Thank you, Chairman. Jessica McCormick, uh City County Counselor District 16. Thank you very much. Frank Emmett, I'm a professor at the IU McKinney School of Law and a member of the Commission. Wonderful, thank you all. And I am Dan Boots. I'm the City County Council in District 3 and have the honor of chairing this commission. We're gonna start today with a presentation by uh Kate Catan. Am I pronouncing that right, Kate? COT and I'm sorry. I'm gonna write that down phonetically. Uh Chief Digital Officer of uh Information Services Agency, and you're gonna talk a little bit about the initiative to strategically and responsibly empower AI use in city-county enterprise. The floor is yours. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the board. Commission. Um thank you so much for the time this evening. Um as you said, my name's Kate Coten, it's like coat and hat. Um, and I'm here to present updates on our AI and Indy initiative, our approach. So I'm gonna start with a quick update to the roadmap that has been presented a couple times before, um, just to talk through status and kind of progress. Everything that's in an outline is um been complete. So starting at the top, um, I won't review Q1, but we have completed our site audit and permission access of SharePoint to ensure responsible and appropriate permissioning and access. Um that was a prerequisite to deploying Copilot. Um, just this past board meeting, we passed a generative AI policy, and it's linked on our AI and Indy public page that was just uploaded today. Um, this new policy and um meeting guidelines are meant to support responsible use of Gen AI tools across the enterprise. We had heard consistently that um stack stakeholders across the enterprise were looking for more clear guidance and how to use AI, um particularly Gen AI tools. So rather than um inhibit their use due to fear, um we've provided guidelines to help guide the responsible use. Um still in progress in the establishment phase is developing an AI security framework.
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