AI in Local Government: How the City of Durham Analyzes Strategy, Risk & Performance

So, okay, well, I'm gonna say I'll put something in the chat. That reminds me, I should put my Teams on do not disturb since I'll be sharing my screen.

I learned to do that the hard way, by the way, where I was sharing my screen and someone sent me all kinds of messages. Yeah, it was awkward, very awkward.

I think this is the, uh, the challenge. Okay, so we're going to start in 1 minute. We're going to let a few more people, uh, join, and then, um, and then I'll get us going. All right, I'm excited about this, so why don't we just go ahead and get started?

Let's go.

Let's go. Hello everyone, and thank you for attending today's webinar about how the City of Durham uses AI to analyze strategy, risk, and performance. This webinar is co-branded by the Alliance for Innovation who's hosting the Transforming Local Government Conference next month in April in Dallas, Texas. We're also very excited that Tracy Miller, a 3-time ClearPoint client, is now the Director of Member Engagement at AFI. Today we have an awesome guest, Shari Metcalf. Shari is the Strategy and Performance Manager working in the Budget Management Services Department at the City of Durham. As we get started today, please note that you can and should use the chat to introduce yourself, ask questions along the way. We'll do our best to answer them as we go. Sheri, welcome to the webinar, and tell me a little bit more about your involvement in strategy at the City of Durham.

Sure. So thanks for hosting today. So yes, I work for City of Durham in North Carolina, and I've been here about 12 years, and we've had a strategic plan here in Durham for a long time. I think 2011 might have been our first strategic plan, so we've been doing this for a while, and we have lots of measures and lots of different things that we use ClearPoint for. And so I'm excited today to come and talk a little bit about how we're using— yeah, how we're building some AI tools in there, or using your AI tools anyway, for our strategic plan.

Yeah, awesome. And AI has certainly been on my mind as it relates to to strategy a lot. I was talking to one of my mentors, Bob Kaplan, the Harvard Business School professor who helped create the balanced scorecard concept, and asking him about AI back in 2024, and he said he had ChatGPT just build a strategy map for Walmart without giving them any additional information. He was totally surprised for it. So, so we've tried to take that, that concept and say, well, what can we do with AI to help organizations like Durham with their strategy? So I wanted to give just a little bit of context. I'm going to share my screen before we jump into this discussion. Let me see if I can share my whole window. Just to give you an idea about where we use AI inside of ClearPoint. Rather than use Durham's proprietary information, we have a fake account called Domino's. And I'm not going to give you a whole demo of ClearPoint, but just wanted to show you a few places where, where we use AI. You know, we believe, well, back in 2024, you could easily ask AI to do analysis for something like a measure to look at the data, to analyze it, and, and write up a summary of how you did this quarter. That's pretty easy. We also do recommendations. So we say, well, based on this data, what would you recommend that we do from there? And those are some pretty easy things. We then started saying, well, how could we use AI to, to help you do things like improve a chart, like make actual an area in purple. And just so rather than you figure out how to, to change something in ClearPoint, AI can do some of that for you. And even, you know, when we get, you know, deeper into an element like actual like a series for this, we could turn on the AI panel and say, well, if we wanted this to be a calculation, we could ask AI to write a calculation for us and then ultimately to create the evaluation for us just to make ClearPoint a bit easier to use. So we, we've put it in all of these different pieces And then one of the more exciting things we've been doing is saying, well, rather than deal with just an individual measure or an individual element in ClearPoint, we've added AI over here on the left-hand side for a full chat. So you could ask it anything you wanted about your information in ClearPoint. And then we said, well, from there, you know, what could we do next, right? And the next thing that we've been doing, this is what Sherry and I are gonna spend most of our time talking about. So this is why I wanted to give you some context of where we are in thinking about AI, is we've created this idea of playbooks. And a playbook, imagine as we put guardrails around the AI to guide you through a process like building your strategy. So if you come to us and you don't have a well-thought-out strategy, but you're thinking about O GSM or balanced scorecard or the Ansoff matrix, we can walk you through that process and help you build your strategy, ultimately just putting it right into ClearPoint. And then when you're ready to cascade that strategy throughout your organization, We've built a playbook to, to look at your enterprise and build an aligned strategy based on different frameworks depending on what industry you're in. Of course, you can, you can do that. And then we're, we're helping you with onboarding, so, so branding ClearPoint to look like your organization, setting up your users' permissions, reporting periods, things like that. And then the big thing we're doing, and we'll talk about a lot of these today, is, is getting insights out of your strategy, right? So it's one thing to, to have a strategy and to report on it each quarter. And what we've seen is a lot of our clients are, are in a, a nice reporting cycle. Every quarter they're getting their data in using the workflows, and then they they have the report. But it was, I think, at last year's ICMA conference where one of the city managers came up to me and said, we're reporting but we're not doing anything. So how can you, you give us more information to allow us to do something? And so like, could we create a SWOT analysis with some recommendations or identify risk as a result of your strategy? And things like that. So really, over the last month or so, Sherri and I have been working in the City of Durham across all of their different departments and saying, well, what can we do? What can we learn? And, and so that's, that's what this webinar is, is all about. Sherri, what did you, what did you think about kind of this, this big picture process that we went through?

No, so, you know, you said the city manager came to you and asked like, what do we do with it all? And yes, so we, we track a lot of things here in Durham and we are constantly trying to have or start conversations like how do we start these conversations with our executive leadership, with our department directors and staff? How do we? That's our, that's a big challenge for us because we do collect all this data. We have it, we can do reports. Sometimes this is a safe space, hopefully we can be a little honest here, it's hard to get people to look at, you know, reports of just all data. It's, it's, that's why I'm such a big fan of these insight reports, because they help to focus and focus on an area to have those conversations. And so that's the big takeaway for me on these is that, you know, we're going to talk about it, but some are great at different levels of the organization, but they all give you such a strong starting point to have those discussions and talk about the data in a way that you can do something with and it, you know, more informative and what can we do, what kind of changes can we make.

Excellent. Why don't we start with one of the ones we, we looked at for kind of your, your 3-year strategic plan, your 2024 to 2026 plan, and this was the the SWOT analysis, and it was a big one. So for those of you that don't, let me just pull it onto the screen. By the way, I took all of these rather than go through all of the individual chats. We exported them just to a simple Word document. So let me just drag it onto the screen. I think I need to reshare my screen. I'm going to stop and reshare. I thought I was doing a whole window. Oh, the entire screen. That's what I want.

I always enjoy when the tech guy has a tech problem. Makes me feel better about my own. All right.

All right. So, so this isn't meant for you to read the entire thing, but I wanted to walk you through kind of what a SWOT analysis is and what, what our, our AI produced, right? So a SWOT analysis goes through strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And typically for your strengths and weaknesses, it looks inside of your own organization, and then for opportunities and threats, it looks outside of your organization. And so the The way the playbook works is it does the same thing. So it looks at this particular scorecard and looks at the last year of information. We anchored it on the December 2025, and it, it just summarized strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats. And then it talked about some strategic implications of it. And then we asked it some questions like, are we doing anything today to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses, or the strengths and opportunities, or to counter the weaknesses and threats? And this is where I thought it was really interesting because the AI looked and said it saw particular initiatives, and it saw how it supported different strengths and opportunities, and just gave a list of initiatives. And then it did the same thing for weaknesses and threats and said, oh, I saw this initiative. It will help address workforce retention recruitment challenges and maybe increase or help mitigate the threat of, you know, workforce competition with this limited capacity to adapt to growth. So Shari, as I mean, this is probably one of the biggest, the biggest ones, the biggest documents overall. You want to talk a little bit about like how you might use this or what you've actually done to it?

Yeah, so this one, so right now in Durham, we are finishing up our last strategic plan, but we are in the middle of a refresh of our, of our next strategic plan. So yeah, this was really helpful because what we did is we looked at our current plan. So we're, but we're 3 years, we're kind of at the end of that plan. And so this brought up a lot of things. There's some really good communication, you know, related items in here. But really, I'm most excited about using this with our next plan that we're building. So it'll be interesting to see what, what, especially what it's bringing from the outside, like, right, with those, those, those threats. I'm sorry, it was the last, the other one, the weaknesses. Sorry, I have a lot of papers in front of me.

Yeah, thank you.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to see what this does to our next plan. But on our current one, it was— it's interesting. It's— I mean, it's interesting, right? What it comes up with. There was one of the recommendations was talking about this predictive analytics. That is something that we have been having some conversations about. But yeah, just kind of diving into that area is really helpful. So bringing that up to the forefront. But yeah, this one, this report, you know, I mentioned earlier, and I'm more of a, like, how do we actually going to use these? This one, this report is, I think, much more in our admin office, like, as a whole, because you're looking at as a whole, right? So helping us to communicate out to, you know, your residents or to our executive team. But yeah, this is a big report used more internally into our office, but definitely looking forward to see what it says about our next plan that we are currently working on.

Awesome. I'm going to pull out the the work we did with the fleet department. Do you want to explain, since not everyone in our webinar is even in local government? So, what is a fleet department?

Yeah, so our fleet department is the department that manages all of our vehicles and things like lawn mowers, anything that moves. Well, not buses, but yes, anything that we own that our staffers, you know, using to do services. So, yeah, they're the ones that buy our, trash trucks, and they manage all of our police cars. So yeah, the fleet of vehicles in the city.

Okay, awesome. And so for the fleet, we did a year-over-year comparison. We looked at 2024 and 2025. And, and what this one did, it's much smaller. Don't worry, we're not going to page through 12 pages of stuff. But we, You know, it looked at some improvements over that time period, like labor hours on scheduled maintenance or percentage of vehicles replaced with smaller engines. And then some challenges. And then what's on the watch list. It noticed that you did have some measures with no status or some missing narratives. And then we just asked, you know, with AI, like, hey, what do you recommend to improve? And it came up with a few recommendations. Did you talk to the fleet department about this? Like, how did—

I did. What have you done with them? I did. And we have a fleet department really into their data. So this one I was excited to talk to our director about. Yeah, so they had a lot of thoughts about this one. They liked it as a summary at the year end. There was some conversation about how this would be a good starting point between— we have in our city, we have deputy city managers that have like portfolios of departments. And so the fleet director using this as like an end-of-year, you know, let's talk about how our measures did this year because it breaks it out on what was working, what was at risk, right? It breaks down into all these different categories. It's also interesting at the end when they talk about, or when it shows up some recommendations, right, to improve. Like the conversation I had with them were like, hey, so we're doing half of these, but these other ones, yeah, we've talked or we're thinking about it. Like it, again, it was a conversation starter, which is what we're trying to, you know, increase in the city is having those conversations. But this one is such a, it's a great year-end kind of high-level department director level report that gives them kind of a, again, it's 2 minutes. It's such a short, it's like such a great summary of Again, fleet is really into their data, so it's a lot of metrics, and it was just such a great way to have like a summary of what's working and what areas need to be looked at. So I thought I liked it for like the department director level.

No, I think that's great. I think the idea of kind of how do you drive to that new conversation and really what can you pull from it. I remember, this would be back when you maybe even started in this role in Durham, is, is in the beginning, like before you came to Durham, so 15 years ago or so, the, the city was trying to tell all of the departments what they needed to manage. And there was a lot of resistance and there was a lot of struggle. And then I think y'all came in and said, okay, departments, you tell me what you manage and you put in the measures. So now the departments have a lot more ownership of this and now you're able to come in and say, hey, how can we support you by kind of analyzing all of your work of the things that you say are important? And then let's bring that up and say, you know, can we improve? And it almost lets you play on the equal playing field with them. They're using their measures, but you're able to drive in and say, drive in like fleet.

Nice, clever.

To come into the conversation. With some extra analysis and even show them how to run their own playbooks on some of this stuff.

And, you know, fleet— so not all our departments are equal, right, in their data lives, for lack of a better way of saying it. Fleet is very good. They really dive into their data. They have a lot of it that they look at all the time. I think this report is even more helpful if I— you know, it would be— and this is what could be said about all of them, like, for the report, for the departments that are a little bit— have a little bit more trouble with their data, a little bit more trouble looking at, like, where should we focus in on, because right now it's a little overwhelming, um, I think this report would be also even more helpful for them. So, because we do have two different types of departments, right? The ones that are— yeah, the ones that are always looking at their data and are really all into it, and then others that are a little bit behind that are just like, I'm not sure what to do with this, and we're just, you know, you know, don't have the staff and that kind of thing.

Yeah, no, great. So we got a few questions from the, the audience. One was, and I'm trying to answer some in the chat where possible, but these are just, these are pretty straightforward. So they're from Charlotte about how much editing did we need to do to get the AI results? And Is, are the AI insights available to, to all users? So, so the AI insights should be available to admins and above. So that includes scorecard admins. And then for these particular playbooks, as I worked with Sherry on them, I copied them over to, to Word. And there I did zero edits to the Word document. So, so what you see in the Word document is exactly what comes out of the AI, but what I did do was a fair amount of prompting so that if the AI was looking at something different, I would like ask it to come back on track or ask it to summarize. So if it did it in 4 different prompts, I would say, okay, can you pull together a full summary? And then it would pull together the full summary, and then I would copy it. In. So, so that's how that works. So one of the other ones on here was identify and register risk. So keep the questions coming, by the way. I will stop after, after each one of these. So to identify and register risk, this was a— this is an interesting playbook because, you know, we worked in the General Services group. So how does— Sherry, just for clarification, for again someone who's not in a city or not familiar with how the City of Durham is organized, you have the first one we looked at was a strategic plan, and then this is General Services. Like, what is General Services?

Yes, so General Services, they manage all of our facility maintenance, They do a lot of CIP project, special projects, not special projects, project management of all of our CIP projects. They do tree trimming, they plant trees, they are environmental group that go out there and work on solar and trying to get our buildings to be more efficient. So yeah, they're kind of a— but maintenance, they're a big maintenance department.

And CIP is capital improvement plans?

Yes, capital improvements are big multimillion-dollar, yeah. New construction, that kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to explain to people is like, hey, if you, if you don't have a capital improvement plan like they do, they rebuild roads or put in rotaries or build new buildings for the cities, things like that. So, so identifying and registering risk is one of two playbooks. So, so this is like part one, which is like what are my risks, like if I haven't done risk management before. And so you can look at the entire city, or you can look at one department. So we looked at General Services. What it does is it, it says, hey, 3 measures are flagged as need improvement, and it shows you which ones they are. And then it says, here's some potential risk. And then it looks at the risk overall. It gives a description of the risk and talks about what's related to, like, that risk overall. So if there's construction schedule delays, real estate processing, and planning schedule delays. And so, again, in the question of, like, is this— how much of this is real versus edited, this would be where I just asked our— our playbook, can you put it in a table in this format? And it did. So, so it just kind of did it. And then it said, okay, then it went out and did some online research for industry best practices, use the COSO framework for relevant risk for general services and public facility asset management. So for that, we just reminded the AI, hey, this is a, a city, and this is their general services, can you research and come up with some industry best practices? So it looked at those and then added them to the risk framework and then made some actions and recommendations. So that's just the essence of how this works. So Sherri, did you share this with general services? Like—

I did. So we talked— so this was— This was just perfect timing and this is my favorite one that we've used and I, so we're in the middle of redoing our strategic plan and one of the council priorities that we are focused on right now is delivering projects on time. And so we have a working group coming together to talk about, or trying to, you know, we need to think of some initiatives like what in the next 3 years can we do to improve our delivery of projects? And then you sent me this. I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. So this, because General Services is this department that manages most of our, our projects, this report came out and I mean, I was, I was super, super impressed. So this came out, we looked at it and then we sent it to that work team. And so most of those people are in General Services that was in that work group, but some were not. And then we had this meeting and it was really interesting because Um, these are the subject matter experts, right? They know that construction schedule delays are a problem. They know real estate— like, they, they know these are big items. But when we get to the second page, when you're talking about the risk and these action recommendations, like, this, this was the meeting that we talked— this is where we started. And so some of these they're already working on, and we were having those conversations. And then some were like, oh, we've been talking about this for a long time, or we have not thought— you know, it was just such a great place to start the conversation that this working team just pretty much went to this— the page you're on right now is a kind of a, this is where we're starting. Like, where, what are, what is the work? What can we do in our strategic plan? You know, where is the movement we can do in the next 3 years? But it was just such a, again, perfect timing that, you know, we were doing this right now. But I'd love to, I'd love to do something like this around other priority areas and see what we come up with. It was just This one was super helpful. This, again, having the conversation, having a strong starting point, and having the right people in the room to really have that conversation. So this one was— this one worked out very well for us.

No, awesome. It's, it's great to hear. And the nice thing is you can go into any of your departments when we run— let me just minimize this one— when we run one of these playbooks, one of the things it does is it will, you know, it will say, hey, let's get, let's get going. And then it says, oh, do you want to do this for a single scorecard, the enterprise and selected divisions, or just the enterprise only? You select your scorecard and then you're off and running. And And so looking forward to the next time I drag you into a webinar to talking about how you've done risk management in a variety of other departments as well. So, so we did 3 more, 3 more playbooks, and I'm going to let you direct me where you want to go. We can— let's show them, let's say, uh, as we're like a measure evaluation for human resources, some measure analysis for workforce and economic development, uh, measure momentum for housing and neighborhood services. Like, what would you want?

I'd like to do the momentum one because there was one— there was a section in the momentum one that I thought was really helpful and it's something that we— it's something that's hard to do with a city our size, right? So did you want to talk about it first?

Yeah, well, with this one, the main point of the playbook is it just looks at, you know, at a minimum a year, and in this case we looked at 12 periods of information and said, here's the start, here's the end, look at all the information you can find. And tell me where you think it's, what measures are improving or declining, kind of above and beyond just a status indicator. Okay.

Yeah. So, my favorite, I thought was super helpful, was the hidden risk section of this report where it looks at your metrics and even though they're appearing to be doing well, it's giving you a heads up that they're green, so to speak, so you're not looking at them maybe as carefully. but they're on the decline. So they're— the momentum is going in the wrong direction. And that is something, you know, we're a big city, we have a lot of metrics that we're looking at. So we tend to focus on the ones that are having issues. But the idea of having, you know, a report that would show us the ones that are on the horizon, and like a couple of these are related to compliance. I think that's very helpful to let us know that we have some, you know, compliance-related ones that are fine. They're fine, but they're not heading in the right direction. And it's, it's been an ongoing, you know, it's been heading in the wrong direction for a little while now. So maybe we should take a deeper look at that. So I thought that was the best part of that report that I thought was most helpful.

Yeah, I really like this one as well because, um, you know, you, you, you immediately think, oh, is someone faking the data, right? But there could not at all be faking the data. You're still within your bandwidth of green, but it's like an early warning system to say, hey, just like what you said, like it's not getting better. Like, let's go ahead and nip this in the bud before it turns yellow or red on us. And then of course, it made some, some recommendations as well. And again, it's not forcing you to do things, but it's just giving you ideas of how to improve.

And then the next one, if you want to just it's the measure evaluation. I mean, I think that's our— I don't want to say basic, but I mean, that is, you know, that's our basic report. Like, what are our measures? Are these good measures? Are these quality measures that we're looking at? This is something we— I mean, we always struggle with this. But yeah, so I sent this to a couple departments. It's just such an easy report, right? It's got this scoring, it's this 1 through 5. The 5s are pretty solid, but it gives you these recommendations. So We heard back from our HR department on this one that he really liked it. And they have some pretty solid measures, but he liked some of these recommendations. It gave him some ideas about, you know, this would be a better— the recommendation was, this would be better if you could break it up by some categories and looking at, you know, is all the categories working well or some categories working better than others? So those kinds of things, I think, are really helpful. This particular person in HR is very good with his metrics. But again, this report, I think, would be very helpful if it was in departments that have a little bit, you know, have staff that are maybe not aren't as involved with their measures as others, to really give them a good starting point. It's a good conversation piece for when we come in. We have a number of departments that we always kind of select some departments each year that we need to come in and work with and really look at their measures, and so this again is just an easy— here it is, let's look at the ones on the bottom half and, you know, what are some of these recommendations? What do we think we can work with these?

No, I think this is great, and what we've tried to do, like, while You know, measure evaluation sounds pretty straightforward. We've tried to take like our years of experience and build it into the playbook to say, here's what really makes a good measure, and when you're looking at the whole of them, some of them can be leading and some can be lagging, but they all should be, you know, clear, measurable, linked to objectives, driving performance. So this one also analyzes the objectives that it's linked to and says, like, is this really good for this one? Like, are you getting kind of the, the right information there?

And we always talk about outcome versus just, you know, a simple counting. And, you know, they're all related, but yes, outcome measures are definitely where we're trying to get. That's all, you know, those are the hardest ones to really, to really get data for. So, right.

So we did, um, a little bit of custom playbook for y'all, uh, as well. And, um, And I'll tell you, most of the work was done just using the regular chat window. But why don't you tell me about your challenge and let's talk about how, how AI solved it.

Dashboard for our strategic plan. It's twice a year we go out, we have about 45 teams of people that work on different strategic initiatives. And so twice a year we send out our email to them asking them for information to update the dashboard. It's a lot of, it's a lot of herding of cats. It's a lot of people that we're trying to get information from. The information comes in, some people like to write, and so we get, you know, paragraph after paragraph. Some people are like, I don't like to write, we get 2 bullets with acronyms in them. And it's for our residents, so we really are trying to focus on plain language, not using acronyms, you know, like CIP and things like that, making sure that people will understand what we're putting in there. We also don't want to, you know, put so much data in there that people are like, I can't even look at this because it's just so long. And so, yeah, so we talked to you about our problem. And what our teams do is every 3 months they go in front of the city manager with a PowerPoint where we've, you know, we build a format into PowerPoint and that's where they give their updates. It's the same information, we just need it put into the dashboard. And so you were able to take those PowerPoints and do some AI magic around that and then populate, take the information from those PowerPoints and put them into the dashboard. And they're formatted all, like it doesn't look like 50 different people went in to make an update. It looks like one person went in, put the update, it's formatted the same. You don't have 2 sentences over here and a book in this one. It's, anyway, I cannot say what a time-saving. It was a lot. It was, we're very happy with that. And as a matter of fact, we've been talking internally about this new plan and how do we make sure that this kind of thing can happen in the future because it saved so much time. And look, it's AI, it has to be reviewed by folks 100%. It has to go back out and be reviewed. But people are so appreciative of having something to respond to versus just, here's a blank, you know, here it is, just put something in there, give it back to us. And people are busy and, you know, but it just saves so much time, Ted. I like, we're still so happy and pleased with what that looked like. So yeah.

Right. So the way something like this works is in the ClearPoint chat, you can upload documents. And this was like an 80-page, PowerPoint document. And this comes back to one goal.

We have 5 of those, but yes, it's a lot of information.

And so, uh, and so this comes back to an earlier question in the chat that I said I would answer, uh, on the screen, um, later. So, so you can put in individual documents. And so I just wanted you to see how the, the knowledge base, uh, works inside of ClearPoint. And this is where it does, um differ from a tool like ChatGPT where you might not want to put all of your information out there. It's inside of ClearPoint, so when you manipulate it, you can just add the answers right back into ClearPoint right where they are. So in the knowledge base, you could put something like an individual, a personal question like the affordable housing initiatives in Durham. I just put it in here just so you can see how like a an individual could put something in here. But then you could also have organizational knowledge. Now this is back to the Dominoes demo. Like all of their financial information, their meeting results, their executive team summaries, things that, that wouldn't be able to be found online. You can link to, you know, a SharePoint file or a OneDrive file or something like that. A folder where you, where you get a variety of documents, or you could just add individual documents if you want. Then one of the things that we're doing that I'm really excited about, it's a partnership that actually starts next week, is we're partnering with Harvard Business Review where we're going to have 200 strategy documents from the leading thinkers in strategy to be able to pull in case studies and examples as you can start to rely on ClearPoint and our AI as your strategy expert. It can look at your proprietary stuff, their proprietary stuff, and feed you, uh, good information along the way. So, so, so this is coming for those of you that are our clients. Uh, get excited about it. We'll be talking about it more, uh, in the coming, uh, few weeks. Then there was one other question about how could you control your own AI. So that's again for an administrator, someone with admin options. We have this AI section, right, where I know that some of our clients are still have working groups where they're not allowed to use AI. So don't worry, you can turn it off, but you can control— let me just see if I can zoom in a little bit— you can control your your tone of voice or your response length or your recommendation type or other guidance. So remember, like what Sherri was talking about is you might have teams of people writing stuff in a variety of different formats. You could write in here, please present it with a 2-sentence summary and bullet points after that, no more than 5 bullet points. And then every time you're asking AI, it could give you particular guidance along the way. And then for that HBR or the expertise guidance, you can assign it out to who in your organization would get access to it. So, so those are the, the pieces. Let me see if I stop sharing. That was Sorry, that was everything I wanted to share today. I wanted y'all to, to see from the, the City of Durham, you know, what they're doing. What are the different types of playbooks that are out there, the different ways that you could, could interact with it, and the way you could bring this strategy expertise let's say, bring expertise and insights to your strategy, right? And so there was a last question about how is this different than Copilot? Copilot might not have the same access to all of the strategic thinking in every single department and how it's organized. And this is just a way to bring that kind of LLM context, the ability to ask questions directly to your strategy overall. So before we do our final wrap-up, Shari, I know, you know, the City of Durham's been doing this for a really long time. What would you say to someone who's just getting started with strategy management or just kind of piqued their interest in AI overall?

I mean, you just got to get in there and start I mean, AI to me is a lot of playing around, right? It's a lot of testing things out and it can be a little bit addicting at times because you just, you keep, yeah, making some changes. But you just got to get in there and start playing around with it. I know it's not the best advice, but I mean, you got to just get started somewhere and see what it does. It's— I have a sister that made fun of me for a long time for being in AI for all kinds of like personal things, right? Things going on in my research or whatever. And then she used it once and calls me up and she's like, oh my gosh, why didn't you tell me that it does this? And I was like, I just, I have, you just haven't been listening. Like, you just got to get in and start, yeah, testing things out.

And that's what we're trying to, to, to do with a lot of these AI playbooks. So there was kind of a last question of like, what are our thoughts on the use of AI and strategy over the next 12 to 18 months? Well, that's, that's really hard to, to kind of predict if you think about where AI has gone and just in the last you know, 6 to 12 months. But what we're trying to do with AI and ClearPoint is, one, allow you to do things inside of ClearPoint easier. Like, we know that, that there have been friction points because our calculation and our evaluation engines are so robust, people have had to learn how they work. How would I write a particular calculation? Now you can just say it. Right? And now you can say, add this action item and link it to this particular measure or department. And you could do that with no problem at all. So, so, so that's one level. And then the second level is getting these, these insights to, to bring your strategy to life and get you out of just reporting because the strategy and budget department is telling you you need to report, but to actually finding great benefits out of the reporting. And that's, that's one of the things we're excited about. Any final thoughts, Sherri?

I'm good. Just, it's, it's been, I mean, you know, you're right about the whole 12 months. It's just so hard. I mean, look at where you guys have come in 12 months. I mean, you know, a year ago we were doing a lot of this kind of stuff on the outside, obviously, of the system, but now it being brought in and the fact that we can bring our own documents in, and this is the first time I've heard too where you're talking about bringing documents in from this other organization. Like, I'm, that's exciting. That's It's, it's moving very fast, so it's a little bit scary, but it is, it's changing all the time, which is also exciting. So there you go.

Yes, Sherry, thank you so much for sharing the Durham story and spending your time with us. I know this afternoon you have budget meetings that you'll be using ClearPoint for, so we're excited about that.

Yep.

But thank you very much again. Thank you. All right, everyone, have a great day.