AI in the PIO's Office: Using It Well, Writing the Policy, Keeping Public Trust
About this course
A practical, self-paced course on using generative AI in a government communications office without losing the public's trust — and on writing the policy your agency almost certainly needs.
Somebody in your organization used AI this week. Possibly to draft a media release, possibly to summarize a report, possibly to clean up a photo before it went on Facebook. In most agencies nobody wrote that down, nobody approved it, and nobody told the public. The tools arrived years before the rules did, and communications is where the gap shows first, because communications is the work that goes out in public with the agency's name on it.
This course is not a warning against AI, and it is not a sales pitch for it. It is a working guide for the person who has to decide what the office will and will not use these tools for, put that decision in writing, defend it to leadership, and answer the reporter who asks whether a statement was written by a machine.
It covers what AI is genuinely good at in a communications shop and where it must never go; the records, confidentiality, and disclosure rules that already apply to every prompt typed into a chat window; how to write an agency AI use policy that staff will actually follow; and how to handle disclosure so that transparency builds trust rather than costing it.
Everything here is grounded in what has already happened to real agencies — the departments caught publishing AI-altered evidence photos, the cities whose ChatGPT logs were released under public records law, the states that now require AI disclosure by statute.
Who This Course Is For:
- PIOs and government communicators at any level of technical confidence
- Communications managers who have been asked "what's our policy on this?" and did not have an answer
- Solo PIOs who are, by default, the agency's AI policy
- Public safety communicators whose agencies are adopting AI report writing, transcription, or translation tools
- Anyone who needs to bring a written policy to a chief, manager, or council
Read a sample from this course
The tools arrived before the rules did
Start with the honest version of where most agencies are.
Generative AI showed up in government offices the way personal email once did: from the bottom, quietly, one employee at a time. Nobody procured it. Nobody trained anyone. An analyst pasted a draft into a chat window because it was faster, it worked, and they told a colleague. Two years later the tool is embedded in the daily work of an organization that has never formally acknowledged it exists.
That gap between practice and policy is the actual subject of this course. The question is no longer whether staff use these tools — they do — but whether the agency has decided, in writing, what they may be used for, who checks the output, what may never be typed into a prompt box, and what the public gets told. In most places that decision has not been made. It is being made by default, one keystroke at a time, by people who have had no guidance and who are usually trying to do good work faster.
Communications is where the consequences land first. Almost everything a PIO produces goes out in public with the agency's name on it, and much of it goes out fast, under pressure, without a second reviewer. If AI is going to embarrass an organization, the media release, the social post, or the photo is where it will happen — not the spreadsheet.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The tools arrived before the rules did
- 2.What the numbers actually say
- 3.Four ways this goes wrong for a public agency
- 4.Two weeks in Spokane
- 5.Why the communications office has to lead this
- 6.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 5 lessons · 34 sections
- 3 downloadable resources