Putting Tech To Work for All New Yorkers

As a candidate, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani seemed pretty tech savvy. His adept use of social media helped him reach a new generation of young voters. But the Democratic Socialist has studiously avoided any talk of technology’s role in his government or the city’s economic future. That’s a mistake. Not only is tech driving the city’s post-pandemic recovery, it will provide indispensable new capabilities the next mayor needs to achieve his goals.

Some progressives view Big Tech and AI as threats to the working class. That’s narrow-minded. New York City’s government has a long history of introducing technological innovations that deliver widespread benefits. In 1968, John Lindsay launched the 911 emergency response system midway through his first term, an innovation that helped him win a tight reelection campaign. Michael Bloomberg expanded the idea in 2003, launching the 311 nonemergency hotline. The opportunity and the need are even greater today.

To use tech aggressively and responsibly, however, the mayor-elect needs a strategy. I see three areas where he can deliver quick wins while also laying the foundations for future innovations that will empower his government to make tech work for working people. First, Mamdani should reboot promising tech programs that languished under the Adams administration. Second, he can reuse proven technology solutions pioneered in other cities. Third, he must reform how New York City’s government builds, buys and uses technology. With this approach, Mamdani can turn the tension around tech into a tool for building the type of city he seems to envision.

Reboot: Deliver On Unfulfilled Promises

New York City was an early leader in using digital technology to improve government. But recent administrations have poorly managed vital programs and neglected essential technology modernization efforts. Mamdani seems to understand that government has to deliver on its promises. Failing to do so undermines its credibility — and the larger project of having a robust public sector that aims to do big things. He can’t simply start over.

Mayor Adams leaves behind an unusually long list of tech missteps. He touted cryptocurrency while shutting down City-led programs aimed at closing a persistent digital divide. The New York City Internet Master Plan, launched by the de Blasio administration in January 2020, made a commitment to universal connectivity and called for a City-owned open-access fiber network. That project was canceled by Mayor Adams in 2022 under pressure from telecommunications providers who didn’t want their broadband duopoly challenged. At the time of this writing, a City Council bill requiring the adoption of a new Internet Master Plan with mandatory five-year updates sits on the mayor’s desk. The new mayor should work with Council leaders to reboot this essential campaign.

Other flagship Adams tech projects overspent and underdelivered. The MyCity portal was intended to be a one-stop shop for City services and benefits. It was launched in March 2023 with just a single feature — a tool for working parents to find subsidized childcare. But after more than two years of mismanagement and $100 million in spending, some $70 million of it going to dozens of contractors, only a handful of new services have been added. And many are simply links to existing City websites that have been online for years. The new mayor must prioritize an accelerated timetable for MyCity and direct agency leads to make the business case for it by quickly identifying ways to use it to deliver better services for less money.

What to do with MyCity’s most derided app — its AI-powered chatbot? Meant to help the public quickly find answers to urgent questions, the tool instead repeatedly delivered false and misleading information, dishing out advice to small businesses on how to break the law, for instance. The mayor-elect’s team might be tempted to step back here. Instead, it should double down and expand the use of chatbots for public engagement. AI technology has improved rapidly since the MyCity Chatbot’s release, and AI systems are much less prone to hallucination. The City’s own tech experts are also much better equipped to anticipate problems with AI systems through “red team” exercises that simulate attacks and malfunctions to identify risks before they’re discovered by the public. But outside help will be essential to success. MyCity’s struggles stem in no small part from the cancellation of a master services contract for digital design, service design and communications design in 2019 by Jessica Tisch — then the City’s tech lead, now police commissioner — which deprived the city of essential expertise in AI interaction. And drawing on intergovernmental municipal collaboratives like the Government AI Coalition can help New York City avoid mistakes others have already made.

Reuse: Copy What’s Already Working in Other Cities

Step two is to borrow technology solutions that are already working in other cities. While New York City often leads in municipal innovation, its size and complexity make it a tough place for startups and social entrepreneurs to test emerging technologies. Smaller cities and cities outside the U.S. are often able to experiment and learn what works more quickly. For instance, the New York City Civic Engagement Commission borrowed Barcelona’s successful Decidim platform to power the 2025-2027 participatory budgeting cycle, which invites New Yorkers to help decide how to spend part of the City’s budget. That tool grew out of the citizen assemblies of the M15 and Occupy era, making it easy for local governments to run massive participatory deliberations online.

Nowhere is the opportunity to learn from elsewhere clearer than 311, which itself was proven out in Baltimore in the late 1990s before Mike Bloomberg’s administration imported it to the Big Apple in 2003. The mayor-elect criticized the aging service in a campaign stop with tech executives, “noting that he can track his DoorDash orders from the restaurant to his door but the public 311 service request system can’t do anything similar.”

Here, New York might look to Beijing’s 12345 service, launched in 2019. While clearly a part of the CCP’s evolving system of social control, the service thoughtfully employs AI features that help operators find relevant information for callers, automate tracking and follow-ups about resolution actions and even help call center staff keep their cool by providing instant feedback on voice stress levels when interacting with angry residents. Expanding the telephone hotline system beyond government services is another innovation that’s long overdue. As the city faces more frequent weather-related crises amid the dismantlement of FEMA, we still lack a dedicated 211 social services hotline that can provide referrals to the network of NGOs that provide the vanguard and bulk of disaster relief.

There are also quick wins that can be borrowed from elsewhere to address the quintessential New York City challenges the mayor is focused on.

Consider housing, for instance. While New York City is the global center for proptech innovation — the application of information technology to the real estate industry, which uses AI to boost bottom lines — it has trailed other cities globally in using these tools to provide affordable homes. A major challenge will be expanding the reach of pro-housing zoning beyond the Adams administration’s City of Yes program into lower-density parts of the five boroughs. In Los Angeles and more than a dozen other cities, the AI-powered Housing Policy Simulator developed at the University of California, Berkeley, is being used to explore how changes in land use regulations and financial incentives will impact the bottom line for real estate developers. This is giving policymakers and advocates the evidence to support reforms aimed at boosting the housing supply.

AI will also be critical to helping expedite review and permitting of proposed development. Portland built a chatbot that makes it easier for contractors to schedule plan review appointments with construction officials. And Honolulu and Austin have rolled out vendor-supplied AI tools that can scan submitted plans for code compliance and flag issues that need human review, reducing processing time from months to days.

Finally, technology can also be a part of solutions to keep people in homes and end homelessness. The Times Square Alliance, for instance, partnered with startup Ginkgo to develop a case management system for unhoused people that helps district managers coordinate services among the vast network of government and nongovernmental outreach programs that serve them.

Other cities are also using tech to deliver more equitable mobility, if not free buses. The Southern California Mobility Wallet provides up to $1,800 for low-income travelers that can be used to pay for transit, bike share or ridesharing services. What’s more, unlike the Fair Fares discount program for New York City Transit riders, credits don’t require a dedicated card but can be loaded to any qualifying payment device. Cities in Europe and Asia are starting to pilot automated buses, which have the potential to dramatically reduce the costs of operating and expanding bus services. While import restrictions bar U.S. transit systems from buying the same next-generation buses available overseas, the mayor’s team can push the MTA to work with transit authorities in other U.S. cities to standardize the technology for automated buses. Led by New York, the largest buyer of buses in the nation, U.S. cities could collectively create a market big enough to entice domestic manufacturers to enter the market for autonomous buses.

Reform: Build the Foundations for Government Transformation

While the mayor should focus on using tech to deliver quick wins, he also needs a plan to rebuild many of the City’s core tech systems and use that as a lever to advance his vision of an efficient and innovative public sector over the next four years.

That starts by providing the City’s more than 300,000 employees the modern tools they need to be effective. Managing hardware and software for such a huge workforce, on a shoestring, is no small feat. But City workers face too many obstacles accessing cloud services and AI tools that could boost productivity and drive innovation, and there are too few training opportunities for them to develop skills to use them effectively. Here, the City could partner with CUNY to develop AI skills curricula that can expand the supply of AI-ready workers for the public and private sectors alike. New York City Economic Development Corporation’s successful Cyber NYC, which focused on cybersecurity training, is one model. Decoded Futures, TechNYC’s AI boot camp for nonprofits, which immerses teams in problem-driven AI prototyping, is another. It could easily be adapted for City government teams.

The City also needs to standardize the tech it provides to members of the public. That goes beyond the single point of access envisioned by MyCity to an entire “gov stack” of modern digital public goods like verifiable digital identities, encrypted personal data lockers and secure electronic payments. The public sector equivalent of Google or Apple’s clouds, these services are the essential building blocks of 21st century government services. In the tiny, wired nation of Estonia, for instance, people can vote and pay taxes online and keep their personal information up to date instead of entering it anew every time they interact with the government. Other nations, like India and Singapore, use this approach to enable more equitable and effective distribution of public benefits, reduce costs for delivering government services and enable ongoing innovations. But no U.S. city has yet followed suit. New York City could be the first, and it would have the potential to make tech work for working people every day.

Success at either of these efforts depends on getting the City’s data house in order. Much of the City’s vast trove of digital records is scattered, poorly documented or low in quality. Some agencies, like the Department of Correction, still run mostly on paper records. This increases costs, slows responses and reduces the effectiveness of City agencies while also inhibiting prospects for innovation.

While the Mayor’s team may be tempted to think big here, most comprehensive efforts to overhaul data practices in large government enterprises get bogged down. Costs balloon, and many such campaigns are abandoned. A better approach is to introduce modern data practices incrementally and consistently from the bottom up, across lots of small reforms to the City’s business processes and governance. In Toronto, city officials have worked with academics to analyze how data move through government for different purposes, like tracking school crowding or coordinating human services. From there, they developed a starter set of data standards, the Toronto Common Data Model, and a model interagency data-sharing agreement that together make it easy for others to copy best practices, organically expand the data modernization effort and feed back their own contributions. In the process, this work is also laying the foundations for future AI governance — as better data standards provide the precise documentation and controls City engineers need to define rules and restrictions for what data AI can scan, what the data mean and their permitted uses.

The final reform is overhauling technology procurement — the rules and processes that determine how the City builds and buys technology. Failing to fix structural obstacles here can doom the best intentions elsewhere. Originally designed to reduce graft, New York City’s procurement procedures aren’t well suited for sourcing innovative technologies. Technical requirements must be spelled out by the City up front, even if officials aren’t aware of all the possible solutions. Long delays in decisions disincentivize risk-taking — a technology may be obsolete by the time a contract is issued. And too much emphasis on past performance favors established contractors over startups with better solutions. One promising reform, challenge-based procurement, is being rolled out in New York City. This does away with specifying solutions to be delivered by focusing instead on describing a problem to be solved and how success will be measured. Boston is using procurement reform as an excuse to experiment with AI by deploying a chatbot trained on the city’s dense stack of procurement rules and procedures, helping government employees expedite their own purchase approvals.

Think Big, Act Small

No New York City mayor can stake their entire agenda on technology. But Zohran Mamdani could be the first to acknowledge that his goals are unachievable, much less on time and on budget, without harnessing the power technology provides to expand government’s capacity and agility. To do so, he will need to commit to the investments and reforms I’ve described.

But he can start small and on point. Tech has immediate potential to advance two of his “big three” pledges — promises to eliminate bus fares and freeze rents for the city’s million-plus regulated apartments. Mamdani may or may not get the $600 million to $800 million needed for the MTA to make all buses free, but he can use tech to speed them up — directing the Department of Transportation to fast-track the installation of priority signaling technology to speed buses through traffic and expanding the use of fixed bus lane enforcement cameras to complement the MTA’s vehicle-mounted systems. On housing, judges may thwart his demand for the Rent Guidelines Board to freeze rents for four straight years — but there’s lots that City Hall’s data science teams can do to keep existing tenants in their homes by analyzing records scattered across agencies to target enforcement against deadbeat landlords and intervene before vulnerable tenants face eviction.

Looking further out, the mayor will need to move deliberately but thoughtfully into the AI-heavy future. Rapid advances in “agentic” AI — software bots that can observe the real world, reason and use tools to take action to achieve designed outcomes — hold great potential for redesigning government to do more with less. Hedge funds are already deploying “virtual employees,” AI bots that help teams with routine administrative and research tasks. In government, such moves will require much more careful consideration. When do such powerful laborsaving tools become anti-labor weapons? And when and how do humans need to supervise the work done by computers? These questions must be answered, probably sooner than we expect. Failing to do so will mean New York City could miss out on opportunities to improve government. But unless the foundations outlined above are in place, we won’t be ready to do so.