This week, I am attending Summit AI New York. Summit AI is a global conference and exhibition focused on the application of AI in business in general as opposed to legal in specific.
As I have mentioned before, I like attending nonlegal tech conferences because they often yield insights we don’t get in our legal tech cocoon. That was certainly true from the opening Summit AI Keynote this morning.
The Keynote was a fireside chat with Matthew Fraser, the CTO for New York City. I almost didn’t attend the Keynote since I figured it would not yield anything possibly relevant to the law. But I was wrong.
New York’s Use of AI
Fraser talked a lot about how the City used AI and Gen AI to help people in small but doable ways. The City uses AI to help people and small businesses obtain benefits and navigate the regulatory system.
“AI is not just about the technical benefits of AI; it’s what you can do from a human perspective,” said Fraser. As part of this approach, the City first recognized that it had to do such things as provide broadband access for everyone in public housing. Broadband access is essential for so many things, like enabling kids to do homework that needs to be done online.
This access enabled the City to then use AI to help residents find the benefits to which they may be entitled. Fraser noted that a person may, for example, have a vague notion they might be entitled to a certain benefit but not what other benefits to which a person in a similar situation typicaly is also entitled. He gave the example of someone who might be entitled to subsidized housing but who would not know they would also be eligible for food
