AI in the PIO's Office: Using It Well, Writing the Policy, Keeping Public Trust

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