Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this edition of the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee.

Today we will continue conversations on the FY27 operating budget.

Today is Teb's Day.

We are glad to have Tebs here with us today to go over their overall budgets and then some other budgets that uh impact their department.

Um so I just want to say thank you uh for assembling everyone today.

And when we turn it over to you, I'm gonna have you introduce everyone.

But before we do that, I'm gonna turn it over to our team here at the council to um uh uh Dr.

Terragus and what there are a number of pieces on the first item going through Teb's just general uh budget, and so we thought we would go through the packet, um, get some uh websites and AI updates because I know people are very interested in that.

Um we can talk about the um health and human services, the um community portal um that we began conversations on Friday, and then close with the reconciliation items and recommendations.

Um if that sounds good to you, um Dr.

Tregus, we'll turn it over to you first.

Uh thank you very much.

And perhaps uh I should would you like to introduce your team first?

I have some some things to go over, and then there'll be questions for you, but either way, Director Roger.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you have in front of you the first of four packets uh for the technology and enterprise business solutions uh department of our county.

On uh page one of my packet, uh, you see that uh the county executive recommends an actual decrease of about uh half a point, uh half a percentage point from uh last year to a total of 72,221,974 for TEBS as a department.

Uh that uh uh recommended budget includes uh about six different program areas within uh TEBS, and each of those is highlighted for you.

Um there are some uh items that uh by the council presidents directive I have uh recommended that you place on the reconciliation list.

These include ad items and increase items, as well as newly recommended CIP items for the 27 to 32 CIP program.

And you'll see there are three of those, and we'll go through them in detail uh uh a little bit later.

Uh I did want to uh uh highlight the OBIT, the uh operating budget equity tool analysis, where uh TEBS has received an excellent mark of nine points.

Um they continue to uh have a very, very solid program for social equity, uh racial equity and social justice.

Um in other words, a proactive and strategic commitment to advancing racial equity and social justice.

Um there was uh public testimony uh which uh uh is available on the on the county website.

And we now come to uh perhaps uh my first uh recommendation for you, which is uh you focused on two items last year in the um uh operating budget discussions with Tibbs.

They were the artificial intelligence, which was fairly new uh for our county.

Uh I think Tibbs has made some significant strides.

I have some questions, and the answers to those questions on the AI topic are start on on uh circle 25 of your packet.

Uh perhaps uh this could be a good opportunity for you to uh hear from Tibbs what they have done since that last year.

We'll do the same thing then for the Web 2.0, which again occupied much of your attention last year, and then we can shift to the HHS question.

So without further ado, I'd like to perhaps uh send it over to uh Tebs.

And uh Gail, you have the floor.

An overview of where we are on the AI.

Okay.

Okay, sure.

So we have um a presentation, but I wanted to start out um by just primarily giving you an update on uh the AI initiatives, all that we've had to do to actually license um uh the AI software, and then begin to establish uh training programs for staff, and then also the methodology that we're using around um how to deploy AI for both productivity gain and efficiency gain in the in the organization.

So I think I'll start with Shana Shayna Taquy, who is our change management chief.

Shayna is responsible for our change management efforts.

We also have established an AI Center of Excellence.

But Shana's going to walk us through what we call our Ignite phase.

And I think it'll resonate with you all based on some of what we've heard lately about projects in general and the things that have to happen in order for these projects to be successful in the end.

Thank you, Gail.

So as Gil mentioned, today I wanted to highlight just a brief piece of our AI strategy and framework.

This is in addition to the broad AI literacy program that the Office of Change Management has administered throughout Montgomery County.

So we have our literacy program.

We also have our AI COE Center of Excellence governance structure, which is led by Gail, our CIO.

And so part of that framework is something that we wanted to share with you this afternoon, which we're very excited about, which is we're calling it Ignite.

So our Ignite framework establishes a formal and repeatable process by which TEBs can work with departments to intake their use case requests.

How can we help to solve business problems, streamline our processes to better serve our residents, and that's always our main goal.

And so we're really going kind of forward with our product delivery framework.

And this we have found is very important in the age of AI and innovation that we learn from best practices.

For example, this is from a Gartner framework that we've studied and case studies within local jurisdictions that have been successful.

And so we have three kind of chevrons as part of this framework, which is Ignite, part of our framework that we're discussing today, that is dedicated also towards really more of a deep exploration and analysis that includes product research and comparisons and working with our local jurisdictions and other partners, for example, the state of Maryland to see how they've done things and what has worked for them and potentially how we can leverage cost-sharing opportunities.

So that's the Ignite portion, and then we move to the scale portion of product delivery where once Ignite is launched, we are then ready to deploy to the enterprise, and it might be a situation where one product could work for four different use cases across many different departments.

And that's why Ignite is so important because it helps us to see the trends and not just specific one-off requests that are coming from different different areas.

So, for example, our data showed us that the Monty technology needed to be upgraded.

And that wasn't something that came from the vendor, it was something that came from Montgomery County employees that saw that we needed to do some remediation as an example.

Can I emphasize Ignite?