When Cities Get Tech Right: The Quiet Innovation in Sioux Falls

There's a lot to like about Sioux Falls' digital transformation efforts, especially when it comes to two fundamentals that often get overlooked in tech conversations: data security and cost awareness. It's encouraging to see a municipality not just chasing trends, but building a foundation that communities can trust. These concerns—security, cost, sustainability—used to be roadblocks. Now they're milestones. More cities are crossing them, and as a result, we're seeing a growing trust in technology from both the public and the people who work behind the scenes.

But there's another part of the article that stood out for a different reason.

"Looking ahead, Sioux Falls plans to implement artificial intelligence, but instead of focusing on the generative AI trend, Sherman said the city's approach is to focus on the use cases he thinks could be most impactful for its government. This includes the use of AI to create something akin to an internal HR assistant, to assist city staff in requesting time off, for example."

Here's the twist: what Sherman describes is generative AI—he's just not calling it that.

And that's actually a great illustration of where we are right now with this tech. "Generative AI" has become such a buzzword that people either overhype it or run from it. But in simple terms, GenAI just means we're moving away from rigid, rules-based systems toward models that can learn, adapt, and respond more fluidly—like an HR assistant that can understand requests and respond conversationally without someone having to write thousands of lines of code to cover every possible scenario.

So while the term might feel inflated, the underlying shift is real—and meaningful. When cities like Sioux Falls focus on real problems and let the technology quietly do its work, we get practical, human-centered innovation. That's the kind of AI adoption worth paying attention to.