The rate AI has improved over the last few years has been astounding. Two years ago, an AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti went viral, all warped noodles and melting faces. Today’s AI version of Smith x spaghetti passes for professional footage. One a recent episode of The States, host Greg Bishop used that pop culture progression to frame the maturity AI has reach in the last year. Reveal’s Jeffrey Wolff, Senior Director of Technology Partnerships, picked it up and pointed to the practical solutions that maturity unlocks in the backlogged world of public records and FOIA response.

Wolff described how AI can layer over and speed up the entire records workflow, regardless of jurisdiction. As the core process rarely changes from one jurisdiction to the next, even as the statutes do. "The workflow is the same for the most part, from state to state, from municipality to municipality," he said. Documents get identified, reviewed, redacted, and produced. AI now speeds every step that once meant manual research, printing, and photocopying.

The efficiency gains are real. Wolff explained that AI can take a first pass at review and redaction, then hand the work to a person to verify. The result, in his words, is requests fulfilled "in a quicker timeframe at a less expensive rate, but with a higher degree of accuracy." Pointing to how people remain central to the process. "A human always has to be in the loop," he said.

Speed also rebuilds something harder to measure. Wolff argued that citizens gauge transparency through how fast and how fully governments answer their requests. When a request drags on for six months or hides behind thousands of dollars in fees, government reads as opaque no matter what it claims. Faster, cleaner responses backed by a clear audit trail give people reason to trust the records they receive.

On the other hand, Wolff pointed to the impact AI has on the volume and content of the records themselves, the very records (emails, agenda, budgets) that constituents submit requests for. The AI doing the work generates records of its own. "AI interactions also create additional government records themselves," he said, and those prompts, responses, summaries, and emails become discoverable under state public records laws. These AI interactions exponentially spike records volumes, making the task of manual review and redaction even more arduous than before. Wolff makes the case for using AI features in public records software to combat the data volume and complexity challenges other AI tools create.  

His advice to agencies weighing all this was direct: Invest in technology, vet it carefully, and make sure it runs inside real guardrails and reflects what comparable municipalities already trust.

Wolff covers more in the full conversation, including the impact agentic workflows pose for FOIA teams. Give the episode a listen and hear where he sees public records work heading next.