As workload gets heavier, councillors eye up AI assistants

Dublin city councillors have asked that a Microsoft training video about the use of generative artificial intelligence be distributed by the council to all of its elected members.

Minutes for the monthly Protocol Committee meeting on 29 January said that members had asked that a training seminar– this particular one focused on Microsoft Copilot – be circulated to all councillors.

Social Democrats Councillor Cat O’Driscoll said that she had suggested that.

She had been at an online seminar about Copilot, organised by the Northern Ireland Local Government Association (NILGA), she said on Monday. “It was specifically for councillors.”

Primarily, it was looking at how to write prompts effectively or how to carry out tasks like reading council reports, O’Driscoll says.

“An example they used was that you could put like, a year’s worth of active travel reports in and ask it to work out what progress has been made, or what questions you should be asking in advance of the next report,” she said.

While councillors on the committee agreed to distribute the training seminar, they do hold some reservations about embracing it.

It would be worth learning more about, says Labour Councillor Fiona Connelly. “I’ll try anything. But I’d prefer to have the information and decide for myself.”

Microsoft Copilot is among the tools already used by council staff. As of June 2025, the council had seven licences to use Microsoft Copilot, according to documents obtained as part of a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

Costing just over €19,000 in total, the contract covers “175,000 messages”, the documents show.

Dublin City Council has issued guidelines for staff outlining what is appropriate usage of AI tools and chatbots, and prohibiting them from using free, publicly available options because of threats to privacy and safety.

“It is always important never to put sensitive, confidential or personal data into the AI systems because such action may result in violations of privacy,” the guidelines say.

The digital councillor

Over the past year, Dublin City Council has been exploring different ways generative AI could support its day-to-day operations.

In February 2025, the council, in collaboration with Trinity Business School and the ADAPT Research Ireland Centre, launched a generative AI lab focused on local government services. The next month, staff received a set of usage guidelines.

During November, the council issued a notice seeking vendors who could assist them in deploying AI tools to increase staff productivity and reduce manual administrative processes, like sorting through vast amounts of data, analysing tender documents, and automating repetitive tasks.

The focus of all that work, though, has been on council staff.

By contrast, this latest training is specifically for councillors, said O’Driscoll, the Social Democrats councillor.

The seminar that O’Driscoll looked in on pitched how Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot could support councillors by streamlining daily tasks while also promoting its responsible use, the NILGA site says.

It was a high-quality training session, O’Driscoll says. “Now it was also nearly an ad for Copilot, why it’s better than other language-learning models.”

Things like writing a press release came up a few times and summarising the minutes from a meeting, she says. “Time saving was a big thing, and it was that you have a research team on your computer.”

It was after that session that O’Driscoll raised the training seminar at the council’s monthly protocol meeting on 29 January, asking that the recorded session be circulated among councillors, she says.

The committee agreed.

Bills or bots

The council’s guidance for staff lays out principles for when to use generative AI – and when to not.

Staff may not use AI tools which have a consumer, rather than an enterprise, licence, it repeats a few times, given how the data of the former can be used.

In the case of Microsoft Copilot on a consumer licence, interactions could impact, among other things, what targeted adverts are served to councillors, while Microsoft holds broad rights over whatever is input, and employees may review the input data.

For O’Driscoll, a generative AI chatbot tool is probably most needed to support councillors in research tasks, which they themselves don’t have the time to do, she says.

“But because as councillors, we don’t have staff, there’s a lot of research that I’d love to do that I don’t have time to be doing,” she says.

Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Heney says one of the major hindrances for her is keeping track of her email inbox. “My important work is emails from my constituents.”

There are times when she has received a barrage of emails relating to online campaigns over a weekend, she says. “You could get 500 emails, and I do recall my friend saying ‘God, why don’t you get Copilot?’”

It would be ideal to have a chatbot to help her find specific email, she says. “In that regard, if there was a possibility to help me in my workload, I would certainly advocate for it.”

But that’s probably as far as she would go, she says.

If councillors end up following the same guidance as staff, though, using Copilot to search and respond to emails could trigger concerns around privacy for constituents and political correspondence.

And for councillors who do end up using AI to draft responses, questions, or positions, there’s a question too of whether they should have to label that content.

Green Party Councillor Ray Cunningham says he can see the necessity and clear-use cases of language-learning models. “But for my work, I think it’s important that I see the information myself, and compose replies or whatever it might be myself.”

Actually seeing and processing what people are saying is an important part of the job, he says. “It’s important for the work that I do to have that direct contact with the constituents as directly as possible.”

Otherwise, the main place an AI might be of use is in navigating a vast document like the city’s development plan, he says.

“Maybe using AI to pull information out of these documents that are hundreds and hundreds of pages long could be useful, but I don’t know how much more useful it would be than just doing a search, or using an index,” he says.

An alternative

Councillor workloads are generally way more than most can manage right now, O’Driscoll says. “More experienced councillors are constantly saying they have noticed a shift since Covid, there’s more meetings, more committees.

Using AI is one way of filling the gap that could otherwise be filled by having staff, she says, while noting too that the Local Government (Support for Elected Members) Bill 2024 could also do this.

That bill, which is sponsored by senators Frances Black, Lynn Ruane, Alice-Mary Higgins and Eileen Flynn, proposed providing administrative support for the elected members of local authorities to assist in their duties.

This proposed amendment to the Local Government Act of 2001 is currently before the Seanad Éireann.