A Mason-based technology company will guide West Chester toward artificial intelligence integration after a vote by the board of trustees green-lit a $50,000 contract with CybrCastle.Sabrina Donley, CybrCastle's practice leader of Secure AI, said the company's role would be to "future-proof" the government in a rapidly changing tech environment.CEO Steve Dong said artificial intelligence can streamline redundant tasks that often take weeks or months to accomplish like reviews of building proposals or zoning variances."It can actually process a large amount of data very quickly, faster than any human can, and also be able to take data from everywhere and culminate very quickly," Dong said.Township Administrator Larry Burks said the government wants to be proactive in the face of waves of technological change."I don't want to be overwhelmed," Burks said. "If we have the technology or a system to put into place, to help my team perform better, I'm all for that."Donley said the AI could assist the municipality and people who need to interact with it in a number of ways.She said, for example, that the police force could use it to better track and maintain the police fleet, or road workers could use AI to track road condition complaints in the wake of a snowstorm. The AI could compile and prioritize information from those complaints to allow a dispatcher to better send plows to specific areas.The latter example could help Dong and Donley personally as they live in West Chester."I think in some ways it actually gives us perspective of, OK, we're the customers in this area too. We want to make sure it's stewarded correctly," Donley said.Dong said that the proper stewardship of an AI system would be critical to its success."AI can multiply what you're already good at or multiply what you're bad at," he said. "It can only multiply. It cannot create."A multi-week training and evaluation program to train staff to work with AI and establish proper protocols for its use will begin Wednesday.Burks said there was no specific timeline for AI integration, but he invited WCPO back to the township once their initial five-phase training concluded.