Milstein describes establishment of Office of Algorithmic Accountability

Great.

Good morning, Speaker Menon, Chair De La Rosa, and Council Members.

My name is Sarah Milstein, and I'm the Deputy Commissioner for Strategic Advisory Services for the Office of Technology and Innovation, OTI.

I'm joined here today by my colleague, CJ Dixon, OTI's Deputy Commissioner of New York City Cyber Command and New York City's Chief Information Security Officer.

I'm also joined by Samuel Levine, Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs and Worker Protection, DCWP, Carlos Ortiz, DCWP's Chief of Staff and Deputy Commissioner for External Affairs,

and Benjamin Krakauer, First Deputy Commissioner for New York City Emergency Management, NYSOM.

In my role at OTI, I oversee both the Office of Algorithmic Accountability, OAA, and New York City Cyber Command.

We appreciate that the Council is holding this timely hearing about the risks of AI technology.

Thank you, Speaker, for getting representatives of the companies that develop, deploy, and

sell AI tools to the general public to speak to the capabilities, limits, and risks associated with these systems at this hearing.

As a representative of OTI, I'm here today to provide information to the Committee of the Whole about how we serve the city's technology and cyber defense needs and to address the proposed legislation that potentially impacts the administration.

For those unfamiliar with our work, OTI's core mission is to use technology, data, and design to make the city work better for New Yorkers.

We achieve this through a wide range of digital products, infrastructure, data systems, and shared expertise.

In other words, we use technology to help agencies make every New Yorker's experience of city government better.

For our discussion today, we can speak to the work we're doing around agency use of algorithmic tools and our cybersecurity program.

To touch briefly on the AI arm of OTI, I'm pleased to share that the Office of Algorithmic Accountability, OAA, has been formally established and six new positions have been created in the FY27 adopted budget to staff it up.

The hiring process for those roles is actively underway.

The OAA's duties include analyzing algorithmic tools submitted by agencies to determine whether there is risk that the proposed tool could result in discriminatory decision making, conducting and publicly reporting on pre-deployment assessments,

creating and maintaining a public-facing platform for submission of comments, establishing a protocol with the Department of Investigation for receiving complaints from the public,

promulgating rules establishing basic compliance standards that all agencies must meet in developing, procuring, deploying, and using public-impacting artificial intelligence,

and reporting the results of pre-deployment assessments and audits conducted by the office.

Overall, the office is progressing as planned, and we remain focused on building the capacity needed to carry out this work effectively.