The Mamdani Administration’s Embrace of In-House Tech Has Little Room for AI

On a sunny Monday morning in mid-July, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and several administration officials trekked to Coney Island to announce a new initiative that would deploy small teams of engineers to fix nettlesome problems within city government.

The city’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) would manage five Public Interest Technology (PIT) crews (a fresh concept for New York government) consisting of product managers, designers and user researchers. The PIT crews would partner with city agencies and create digital products to help consumers save money and make time-consuming processes easier to use. 

“New Yorkers should not be forced to navigate systems that are confusing, outdated and burdened by bureaucracy,” Mamdani said at the time. “These teams will move quickly and deliberately to solve real problems.”

Three months later, city officials unveiled an online portal that its in-house engineers built that allows New Yorkers to file complaints against businesses that made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and memberships. The website, which had recorded thousands of complaints, coincided with a new city rule empowering the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to charge businesses $525 for each violation.

“It’s a remarkable feat to build and launch something in 10 weeks, saving months of lengthy procurement,” Luke Farrell, OTI deputy commissioner and senior adviser, told Commercial Observer. “We cut over a dozen questions from those forms to make it easier to submit a complaint and made government processes easier to interact with.”

When Mamdani campaigned for mayor with a pledge to tackle the city’s cost of living and slash red tape, he said technology would be at the forefront of his solutions. 

Previous administrations worked with outside consultants to launch tech products that never lived up to their promise by the time they were introduced. Bill de Blasio’s LinkNYC network of kiosks offering free Wi-Fi and mobile charging cost $200 million to install, but three-fourths of the structures developed defects, and the consortium in charge of the project fell $69 million behind on its obligations with the city. Eric Adams’s MyCity portal was envisioned to be a one-stop platform for all city services. It cost the city $100 million to build, but the site was ineffective at providing parents with child care vouchers, and it remained unclear what many contractors contributed, a New York Focus report found.

The new mayor is taking a different approach. Mamdani and his advisers had adeptly used their social media expertise to create short campaign videos about the rising price of halal food and small business fees that spread well beyond the electorate. Now, in office, the mayor and his staff are turning their attention toward addressing the city’s affordability crisis by finding ways to limit required paperwork and permits, reduce fines and fees, and create better housing lotteries.

“This is the first time we have a lot of digital natives in City Hall,” said Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC. “The biggest challenge to deploying technology is not technical. It’s often cultural and based on the fact that so many things were done a certain way for so long. It’s a pretty basic change of management, which is really hard.”

Building teams of nimble tech experts who can drop into agencies and work with policymakers to solve problems is not a new idea. 

A group of city tech leaders drafted a digital road map for the city ahead of the 2013 election that called for “civic hackers” to work with agencies and develop solutions to meet the needs of underserved New Yorkers. Engineers employed by the city would potentially deliver results faster, cheaper and with more flexibility than private-sector consultants who would be bound by the limits of their contracts.

“When you have a consultant, you have them build on spec,” said Noel Hidalgo, co-founder of the civic technology organization BetaNYC. “But, when you have in-house talent, you’re able to be agile enough to lead when the priorities change. That’s the technology leadership gap that currently exists.” 

Real estate owners and small businesses could soon notice benefits. At the mayor’s transition team meetings last year, conversations focused on making sure government services were frictionless and more accessible to the public, such as streamlining permitting to speed up affordable housing construction or ensuring entrepreneurs have the tools to more easily start a business. 

Hidalgo believes the various PIT crews will focus on making it easier for citizens to submit forms — whether it’s to start a small business, file a permit, or make a complaint — by standardizing interfaces and making sure there is reusable software code so different agencies do not have different workflow products.

“Thinking through the future of forms is a way to control information and, frankly, that is where the PIT crew has the greatest opportunity,” he said. “New York City exceptionalism has held us back, but enough people understand that has been wrong and now it’s time to catch up.” (City technology officials declined to specify its PIT crews’ next projects, but said they would focus on the mayor’s affordability agenda.) 

One innovation the PIT crews won’t be using to develop solutions, at least at first, is artificial intelligence. The mayor strongly criticized the lack of federal regulation of the AI industry, which has left people worried about the future of their jobs, their children’s education and even humanity itself.

“As we are looking at what comes after this federal administration, there has to be a very different kind of framework in how we think about AI, talk about AI, the accountability we’re willing to bring forward when it comes to that,” Mamdani said Oct. 19 at an event about the future of AI. 

City Hall began hiring AI and privacy experts this year. Among them were Rashida Richardson, a former senior counsel at Mastercard, who was hired to be a senior adviser. Computer scientist Lisa Gelobter, who helped create GIFs and co-launched Hulu, was hired as chief technology officer.  

But attempts to integrate AI into city government this year have been rocky. In March, Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels issued preliminary guidance for students and teachers on how to use chatbots and other AI tools for their homework and lesson plans, sparking a backlash that led the city Department of Education to ban the use of generative AI at the start of the new school year. 

This month, City Council Speaker Julie Menin led a hearing that pressed the leaders of AI companies about the risks the public faced from the rapidly developing technology. Meanwhile, the Mamdani administration proposed a rule requiring businesses to restrict the use of automated chatbots — although that hasn’t stopped city workers and even City Council members from using AI to write content and make their jobs more efficient on their own. 

The next step for the Mamdani administration will be to think about how government services will work in an era when increasing numbers of New Yorkers have their own AI agent managing their lives. That will involve connecting government data to AI models while ensuring they remain secure for its residents.

Jordan Barowitz, principal at Barowitz Advisory, believes AI is well suited to giving real estate owners and entrepreneurs a road map for which permits they need to build their buildings or open a business. 

“You talk with any small business owner, and the opacity of the permitting process is maddening,” he said. “AI should be able to tell you, ‘Here are the six agencies you need to go to and here is the sequence.’ The problem is all the gray areas you run into and you get caught in limbo. That’s where you can hang out for months seeing your life savings drain as you wait for a resolution.”

Some business leaders also warned that the Mamdani administration’s attempts to use AI or new portals that could synthesize government systems will not go smoothly, especially when public sector unions will fight to defend the size of their workforce.

“The technology conversation is a good one, but it’s a tough conversation when it starts to impact headcount because that’s where the real cost savings are,” said Steven Fulop, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. “The politics will be met with pushback from labor, and that’s where leadership will really come in with the mayor.”

Tech:NYC’s Samuels is not worried that new technologies will lead to public sector layoffs. 

“If anything, there’s so much need and the city has a hard time meeting the moment,” she said. “Retraining city workers to use AI and other materials is a big piece of the puzzle, but it’s true across the economy.”