As one of Washington’s fastest-growing cities, Lake Stevens moved early to address the risks of Shadow AI and ungoverned generative tools. With Darwin AI, the city gained visibility, enforced policy guardrails, and ensured full auditability to meet public records requirements.
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The City of Lake Stevens is one of the fastest-growing communities in Washington State. Under Mayor Brett Gailey’s leadership, the city has embraced Lean Six Sigma principles to ensure that as it scales, government operations remain efficient, fiscally responsible, and transparent.
As AI adoption accelerated across local government, Lake Stevens recognized both the opportunity and the risk.
As generative AI tools became easily accessible, staff began using them to support city work, sometimes through personal or unapproved accounts. While well-intentioned, this “Shadow AI” created potential data privacy and compliance exposure. The city lacked visibility into what tools were being used and how information was flowing. At the same time, the city was already under operational strain from Public Disclosure Requests.
AI adoption introduced another layer of risk: if the city began using AI to improve efficiency, could it also explain how those outputs were generated? Many municipalities were unprepared to respond when asked for metadata or audit trails behind AI-driven answers.
Lake Stevens needed a way to govern AI usage, enforce policy, reduce administrative burden, and preserve public accountability.
Rather than waiting for a breach or compliance failure, Mayor Gailey chose to establish governance early. Darwin AI gave the city immediate visibility into authorized, unauthorized, and Shadow AI activity across the organization—turning AI usage from a blind spot into a monitored system.
"Darwin is to AI what McAfee is to your internet security. It helps staff understand that they have guardrails on their AI usage within an organization. Right now with the Darwin product, we’re able to see authorized, unauthorized, and shadow AI. That lets us know where we’re at." — Mayor Brett Gailey
Darwin AI also transformed policy from a static document into an active enforcement layer, blocking risky behavior before it could result in a data breach. With both visibility and real-time enforcement in place, AI usage became governed infrastructure rather than unmanaged exposure.
Beyond governance, the city needed to ensure AI-driven outputs could withstand public scrutiny. Mayor Gailey has seen peer cities struggle when asked to provide metadata behind AI-generated answers.
"Several of my sister cities have already been asked: 'Hey, give me the metadata behind that AI answer,' and they can’t provide that. They don't know how. Darwin can get you there with the metadata behind a lot of the things going on in your system." — Mayor Brett Gailey
Darwin AI provides the metadata and audit trails necessary to support public accountability and legal defensibility, especially with new open records requirements that now apply to government use of AI in Washington. With Darwin, all AI outputs are traceable and reviewable, ensuring that automation enhances, rather than compromises, transparency.
With governance established, the city turned to its most resource-intensive workflow: Public Disclosure Requests.
Using Darwin Launchpad, Lake Stevens is building a custom AI-driven workflow to read incoming requests, retrieve relevant records across systems, apply redactions, and generate a structured draft response.
"Of my 140 employees, 6 of them work entirely on public disclosure requests. It's such a pain point for us and so expensive. My ideal public disclosure request AI platform would read the request, understand it, go into my databases, pull the data, redact it, and my clerk wakes up in the morning with an 80% solution. What's great is, under Launchpad with Darwin, we're building that." — Mayor Brett Gailey
The projected result is an 80% complete solution before staff begin manual review, dramatically reducing time spent on repetitive administrative tasks while maintaining compliance. Darwin’s LaunchPad product enabled Lake Stevens to rapidly leverage the power of AI to transform a complex set of processes, without having to change their underlying systems.
Lake Stevens demonstrated that cities do not have to choose between innovation and control. With the right governance layer, AI can be secured, enforced, and made fully accountable. This foundation has also enabled Lake Stevens to unlock AI’s true potential by enabling them to build governed, AI-enabled workflows on top of it.
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