The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Government Industry in Midland in 2025

Midland's 2025 strategy moves AI from pilot to program: a proposed $9.2M technology fund (part of an ITSD budget now $12.1M) and eight new ITSD positions aim to fund tools and staff to deploy automation, improve citizen communication, and speed service delivery - while West Texas is building regional capacity, including a planned 250MW net‑zero AI/HPC data center in Ector County that could provide local compute and fiber options for municipal AI projects (site plans target an initial phase in late 2026).

See the city's budget priorities in the GovTech coverage of Midland's proposal and consider workforce upskilling through practical courses like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work bootcamp to prepare staff for procurement, oversight, and prompt engineering.

“leverage and expand the use of technology to facilitate the exchange of information,” and “harness automation and artificial intelligence technology for efficient resource utilization.”

Midland is investing in AI now because municipal services face rising demand and tight budgets, and the city has both a concrete funding signal - a proposed $9.2M technology fund inside an expanded $12.1M ITSD budget and eight new ITSD positions - and regional infrastructure that can turn pilots into persistent capacity (a planned 250MW net‑zero AI/HPC data center in Ector County).

That combination lets city leaders move from costly, recurring cloud experiments to locally hosted models that lower per‑project operating cost and enable practical services such as on‑site predictive emergency response analytics that improve dispatch efficiency and save lives; local training and workforce pathways also matter, so targeted upskilling can turn clerical roles into oversight and prompt‑engineering positions.

National and international capital markets are already channeling significant investment into AI startups and infrastructure - an important signal that talent, vendors, and best practices are maturing - so Midland's timing steers limited dollars toward procurement, vendor oversight, and the first deployable use cases.

For practical starting points and municipal prompts, see Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work syllabus for practical AI at‑work training and the Complete Software Engineering Bootcamp Path syllabus for full‑stack and infrastructure skill development.

“Sustainable and fair funding reforms remain urgently needed.”

TRAIGA - the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act signed into law in June 2025 and effective January 1, 2026 - creates an intent‑focused compliance regime that matters for Midland because city systems, contractors, and any vendor offering services to Texas residents now face clear prohibitions (no AI designed to manipulate behavior, unlawfully discriminate, produce unlawful deepfakes, or be used by government for social scoring) and new transparency duties when agencies deploy AI to interact with citizens; see a concise overview of TRAIGA's scope and disclosure rules from Skadden and a practical compliance guide from Ropes & Gray.

Midland should inventory every chatbot, predictive model, and vendor tool that touches residents, add plain‑language AI notices at citizen touchpoints, and avoid biometric identification from public media without consent - because enforcement rests with the Texas attorney general (no private right of action) and penalties can reach $80–$200K per uncurable violation plus daily fines unless cured within the statutory 60‑day cure window.

The law also offers operational levers Midland can use: a 36‑month regulatory sandbox for safe testing and safe‑harbor defenses for documented risk‑management practices (for example, substantial compliance with the NIST AI RMF), so thorough documentation of purpose, training data, performance metrics, and post‑deployment safeguards will be the single most important municipal control to limit liability and keep local services running.

Midland's AI program sits inside a layered enforcement landscape: at the state level HB 2060 created a statutory Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council and required executive and legislative agencies to file detailed inventories of every “automated decision system” (vendor, data inputs, testing for bias, and IT fiscal impacts) - filings were due July 1, 2024 and the council reported to the Legislature by December 1, 2024 - while 2025's Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) adds a binding compliance regime with clear prohibitions on government social‑scoring and biometric uses and an effective date of January 1, 2026, meaning Midland must document purpose, training data, testing, and post‑deployment controls to get safe‑harbor protections; see the HB 2060 bill analysis and a Texas AI overview for context.

Concurrently, the Texas Attorney General has shown an aggressive posture - investigations and actions in 2024–2025 (Pieces Technologies settlement, DeepSeek probe and device ban, lawsuits involving TikTok and Allstate) illustrate that data‑security and children's‑safety claims are being enforced against both vendors and deployers - so expect vendor subpoenas or Civil Investigative Demands as a real risk.

Federally, existing statutes (HIPAA, FCRA, ECPA), recent executive AI orders, FTC guidance on deceptive AI advertising, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework create additional compliance touchpoints Midland must follow when handling health, credit, communications, or consumer data.

So what: the practical bottom line for Midland is simple and urgent - maintain an up‑to‑date agency AI inventory, documented third‑party testing and bias assessments, and contractual audit rights with vendors to reduce exposure to state AG scrutiny and to qualify for TRAIGA's operational levers.

“As AI becomes more prevalent as a revolutionary tool in our lives and in our workforce, we must ensure that this technology is developed in a responsible and ethical way… To protect Texans' privacy and basic civil liberties, I signed legislation creating the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council to study and monitor artificial intelligence systems developed or used by our state agencies.”

City departments should treat AI governance as operational hygiene: maintain a live inventory of every chatbot, model, and vendor touchpoint, add clear plain‑language notices where residents interact with AI, and require contractual audit and data‑access rights so the city can verify training data and testing records; TRAIGA's intent‑based liability, NIST safe‑harbor pathways, and a 36‑month regulatory sandbox change the calculus for municipal oversight, so align policies with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, document purpose/design/testing (including adversarial red‑team results), and prepare to cure issues quickly - remember the Texas AG gives a 60‑day cure window but penalties for uncurable violations can reach $80K–$200K per violation.

Use Midland's new technology fund to staff governance roles (procurement oversight, privacy, and incident response) and prioritize vendor SLAs that guarantee transparency and logging for audits; for a practical legal primer on TRAIGA obligations and safe harbors see the Baker Botts Texas TRAIGA overview (2025) and for local budget context see the GovTech Midland 2025 technology fund proposal.

“leverage and expand the use of technology to facilitate the exchange of information,” and “harness automation and artificial intelligence technology for efficient resource utilization.”

Midland's procurement playbook should bake cybersecurity and AI‑specific controls into every RFP and contract: adopt tailored sample clauses (identity and access controls, multifactor authentication, automated patching, secure communications, data‑minimization, and US data residency) drawn from federal model language so vendors must deliver annual third‑party assessments, 48‑hour incident notifications, and indemnity for breaches rather than billing the city extra for

security work.

Require centralized logging, cryptographic agility, EMV/PCI compliance for payment pathways, and automated patch‑management with test windows and rollback plans; make audit and source‑code or model‑explainability review rights contractually enforceable and tie cybersecurity SLAs to procurement milestones and payments.

Practical detail: specify that a five‑year contract carries five years of cybersecurity obligations and a clause for timely plan updates and evidence (annual self‑assessments or third‑party reports), which turns vendor promises into verifiable deliverables.

Use the Joint Office's sample procurement language as a starting point and have procurement counsel adapt it to Midland's TRAIGA obligations and local ITSD budget priorities so the city keeps operational control and audit leverage over critical AI systems.

See the Joint Office cybersecurity clauses and local AI prompts for practical RFP wording and use cases.

Texas is quickly becoming a national hub for large-scale AI infrastructure, and the most consequential project for Midland is OpenAI's Stargate campus in Abilene - a West Texas “AI factory” buildout that already secures roughly 1.2 GW of power on an 875–1,100 acre site and is being expanded by partners including Oracle and SoftBank; see the Stargate Abilene data center profile for campus details and reporting on the broader expansion and grid implications.

For Midland the so‑what is concrete: a regional cluster this size creates nearer fiber routes and local compute supply that city IT planners can evaluate for lower‑latency municipal workloads, potentially reducing long‑haul cloud costs, but it also raises grid and transmission pressures that will shape timelines and procurement decisions for any locally hosted AI/HPC strategy.

Track capacity and vendor timelines closely and require contractual outage, energy‑use, and latency SLAs so Midland can convert regional buildout into reliable, affordable compute for core services.

“Easy to throw around numbers, but this is a gigantic infrastructure project.”

Midland's next step should include funding independent, third‑party assurance to turn vendor claims into auditable evidence - one practical option is Intertek's newly launched Intertek AI², the world's first end‑to‑end AI assurance programme (launched June 24, 2025) that organizes services around four core pillars: governance, transparency, security and safety; use a portion of the city's technology fund to pay for an Intertek pre‑assessment and ISO 42001 training to document purpose, data lineage and controls required under TRAIGA, then commission red‑team cybersecurity testing and independent robustness and bias evaluations so municipal RFPs can require verifiable test reports rather than vendor self‑attestations (see Intertek AI² for programme details and their AI Safety & Security offerings for red teaming and cyber assessments).

The so‑what: Intertek's global footprint - more than 1,000 laboratories and offices in over 100 countries - lets Midland schedule verifiable, repeatable tests and certifications that create the concrete audit trail Texas regulators and the Attorney General will expect, and that procurement teams can tie to milestone payments and remedial cure periods.

“AI is reshaping our world at an unprecedented pace as organisations race to integrate AI into their systems and products to take their customer service to new heights and unleash new levels of productivity. Intertek AI² is the world's first independent end‑to‑end AI assurance programme to enable organisations to power ahead with smarter, safer and trusted AI solutions.”

Midland can deploy practical, high‑impact AI now - AI‑powered chatbots and digital assistants for 24/7, multilingual service to reduce call‑center backlogs, predictive emergency‑response analytics to speed dispatch, and automated form‑processing to cut permit turnaround time - but each use case must be paired with concrete controls: require plain‑language AI notices and vendor audit rights to comply with TRAIGA's disclosure and penalty rules, mandate third‑party verification (for example, Intertek AI² independent assurance) before milestone payments, and use DIR's shared services or the regulatory sandbox to trial systems safely; tying one concrete action - funding an Intertek pre‑assessment from the city's $9.2M technology fund - creates an auditable trail that helps meet TRAIGA's 60‑day cure window and materially lowers the risk of $80K–$200K per uncurable violation.

These steps let Midland capture efficiency and service gains described in local government pilots while preserving resident trust and giving procurement teams enforceable leverage over vendors.

For examples and operational guidance see AI use cases in the public sector and the Texas TRAIGA compliance overview.

“AI is reshaping our world at an unprecedented pace as organisations race to integrate AI into their systems and products to take their customer service to new heights and unleash new levels of productivity. Intertek AI² is the world's first independent end‑to‑end AI assurance programme to enable organisations to power ahead with smarter, safer and trusted AI solutions.”

Midland's immediate next steps are practical and time‑bound: finalize an AI inventory, add plain‑language AI disclosures at citizen touchpoints, and require vendor audit rights and logged provenance to qualify for TRAIGA's safe harbors and meet the Texas AG's 60‑day cure process - see the Baker Botts TRAIGA overview for the legal essentials; simultaneously, align procurement and testing to NIST's AI RMF, evaluate applying to the DIR 36‑month regulatory sandbox for safe testing, and use the proposed $9.2M technology fund (and the eight new ITSD positions) to finance independent assurance and staff training; for local budget context review Midland's 2025 technology fund and ITSD proposal.

A single, memorable action: allocate funds for an Intertek pre‑assessment and a NIST‑aligned documentation system and require that independent report before vendor milestone payments - that auditable trail materially lowers the city's exposure to TRAIGA fines (including $80K–$200K for uncurable violations).

To build operational capacity quickly, enroll oversight and procurement staff in practical courses like the Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration so the city turns policy into enforceable contracts and tested, resident‑safe services.

“leverage and expand the use of technology to facilitate the exchange of information,” and “harness automation and artificial intelligence technology for efficient resource utilization.”