Technology has never been far from what I’ve done. After eight years in the Marine Corps, I spent much of my professional life modernizing technology and managing risk at large tech companies while also working my way up through campaigns and policy work. From the time I took off my uniform, my sense of duty and service has never changed. For me, doing what I do as mayor is no different than what I’ve done in the private sector. It's about using innovation to make institutions work better.
Three years ago, when the opportunity arose to run for mayor of the newest city in the country, and the largest city in Cobb County—where I live, where my kids go to school, where my mom retired from the local hospital—deciding to step up was a no-brainer. Most cities have decades of legacy systems, outdated processes, and institutional habits that just exist. That was not going to happen here.
We were born in the cloud. There was no digital transformation. In the beginning, we only had a few staff members and real budget constraints. I looked at it like I was back in the private sector as a network architect, designing and building within the constraints we had. The Google ecosystem was an obvious solution for our lean team because it’s so comprehensive: identity management, email, security, records management all under one roof and not a single server. We've seen significant cost savings in our first three years simply by how we built out our infrastructure.
We also built a generative AI policy from the beginning and put it directly in the employee handbook, so staff know that AI is not only acceptable here; we're going to help them use it ethically and responsibly. We surveyed every employee about how they were using it and what they needed to become better AI users. Department after department told us they were shaving hours off their days. That kind of time savings allows us to serve our residents in a way we simply could not otherwise by allowing us to focus on people rather than paperwork.
We use Gemini within the City’s Google Workspace environment to help cut through the noise. My office leads constituent services, so we get tons of requests, concerns, and complaints. I can use Gemini within our secure Workspace environment and ask it to help me analyze the information to answer questions like: Where are the issues concentrated, what types of complaints are coming in, and which concerns are most pressing?
I took our entire public transit data set and put it into Gemini within our secure Workspace environment to cross-reference it with crime statistics and economic development data, things that would have taken easily eight months to work through manually. Now we can see public transit hot spots, get a better understanding of the surrounding areas, and see where economic development could better flourish.
Gemini Notebook I use in a different way because it’s about aggregating different types of data. I've pulled in our city charter, ordinances, resolutions, state code, intergovernmental agreements, and minutes from every city council meeting. Now, if I want to know whether one of our policies is consistent with state code, it's all right there.
If you value consistency in how you're governing, this is one of the ultimate tools to help you do that. For example, I can answer questions such as “Based on the last five zoning approvals, how does this one differ?” I want to make sure I'm being consistent in how I assess these cases, and Gemini Notebook helps me do exactly that.
I want other cities to be able to learn from what we're doing. There are solutions out there. It just takes the willingness to dive in and embrace the technology, not for technology's sake, but for how it can help build something better. My vision for AI isn't to replace public servants. It's to give every public servant an intelligent assistant that helps them spend more time actually serving residents.