IDEAS FOR THE WORK AHEAD
Clear perspectives on a changing technology landscape, with the people and responsibilities of local government in mind.
1–12 of 162 articles
Latest article Online Marketing
One of the most useful AI-adoption lessons I have seen recently came from Microsoft itself. After running hundreds of internal AI projects, Microsoft found something that many organizations will probably recognize: Deploying AI tools and training people how to use them was not enough. Microsoft had AI licensed to more than 200,000 employees, but […]
Read articleOnline Marketing
As we move from AI that simply answers questions to AI that can actually take action, one governance question is becoming much more important: What counts as an AI incident? That sounds simple until you start thinking about what AI agents can now do. They can access systems, use credentials, move information, trigger workflows and […]
Read articleOnline Marketing
AI agents are getting more capable. They can read documents, search records, trigger workflows, draft reports, update systems and increasingly communicate with other AI systems. Very cool. But there is a much more important question local governments need to be asking: Who can stop them? Microsoft AI recently published a draft Humanist AI Code […]
Read articleLocal Government
What Microsoft’s Grok integration means for Canadian local governments Imagine a municipal employee opens Word, selects an AI model inside Microsoft Copilot and asks it to summarize a document. The employee is still in Word. The screen still says Microsoft. The experience looks familiar. So it would be easy to assume the information is still […]
Read articleLocal Government
What xAI’s procurement experiment can teach local governments about governing AI agents Municipalities spend a lot of money on software. Some licences are essential. Some overlap with other products. Some were purchased for staff who have since changed roles. Others continue renewing because nobody had time to investigate whether all 150 seats were still being […]
Read articleLocal Government
AI may live in “the cloud,” but the buildings that power it live in municipalities. They occupy land. They connect to local infrastructure. They consume electricity and water. They create construction activity, tax revenue and jobs. They may also generate noise, require major utility upgrades and place new demands on emergency services. So when a […]
Read articleLocal Government
An AI agent was given a cybersecurity task. The approved route did not work, so it found another route. Then it showed other agents how to use it. That sounds like the beginning of a science-fiction movie, but it comes from OpenAI’s account of a real incident during internal cybersecurity evaluations in July 2026. This […]
Read articleLocal Government
The more local governments I speak to, the more I hear this: “I just use Claude. I pay for it myself.” I understand why. Staff are busy. They discover a tool that can summarize a report, improve an email, compare documents or help draft a policy. The organization has not yet provided an approved AI […]
Read articleLocal Government
AI may live on your laptop. But AI at scale lives in buildings. Very large buil dings. Buildings full of specialized computer chips, connected to enormous amounts of electricity, cooling systems, fibre networks, backup power and physical infrastructure. And that is exactly why local government should be paying attention. Because the next big AI conversation […]
Read articleLocal Government
One of the biggest mistakes I see in AI conversations is starting with: “Can the AI do this?” That is not really the governance question. The better question is: Should it do this, under what conditions, with what controls, and who remains accountable? That is where responsible AI governance actually starts. For local government, this […]
Read articleLocal Government
The conversation about AI and jobs usually goes straight to one question: “Is AI going to replace people?” But the Bank of Canada recently published a labour-market analysis that suggests the picture may be more complicated than that. Their researchers found no evidence yet of a broad AI-driven restructuring of Canada’s labour market. That is […]
Read articleLocal Government
The smarter our AI agents get, the more important our underlying Microsoft 365 permissions become. That is one of my biggest takeaways from Microsoft’s recent look at how it is using Copilot Cowork internally. Cowork can do some pretty powerful things. It can complete multi-step work across Microsoft 365. It can keep working in a […]
Read articleWHAT CLIENTS SAY
Read letters of recommendation from the communities and teams who have worked with Catch the Beat.
