When we shared our recent research on AI in recreation, one theme came through clearly: organizations are increasingly familiar with AI, but they are still figuring out where it fits and how to use it responsibly.
To explore those findings further, we hosted a webinar bringing together research insights and real-world perspectives from leaders across the field.
One of those leaders was Tyler Lockwood, Community Services Supervisor for the City of Escondido. Tyler is a Parks & Recreation professional and team leader who has built much of his career around onboarding new technology to improve workplace efficiency.
That made him an especially valuable voice in the conversation.
Tyler brought a perspective that felt distinct from many broader AI discussions: practical, policy-aware, and grounded in the realities of local government. His comments reinforced an important truth behind the research: in Parks & Recreation, the future of AI will not be shaped by hype. It will be shaped by governance, trust, and whether new tools actually solve real operational problems.
If you’d like to hear the full discussion, you can watch the webinar recording here.
Here are a few of the biggest insights Tyler shared.
One of the strongest themes in Tyler’s comments was that organizations cannot approach AI casually, especially in a government setting.
The City of Escondido, he explained, has moved through every phase of adoption over the past few years — from early awareness, to informal experimentation, to a more structured strategy led in partnership with the city’s IT department.
Today, a designated group of authorized users is piloting Microsoft Copilot as part of a citywide effort to better control how data is shared and protected.
“Before you develop any tools, workflows, or internal policies, make sure you understand who has the authority to make those decisions. Otherwise, you could spend a year building something that gets overridden in a single email.”
That point is especially relevant for public agencies, where departmental initiative still needs to align with broader city policies, technology standards, and security requirements.
Tyler was clear that this kind of coordination is not just about process. It is about risk management.
“The starting point for us was security. Once you understand that AI can create real risk if it’s used without guardrails, the next question becomes: how do we create a more secure path for using it well?”
In Escondido’s case, that led to a more controlled pilot through existing Microsoft infrastructure instead of a free-for-all across open AI tools.
One of Tyler’s most useful contributions to the webinar was his insistence that recreation professionals should not assume AI is the answer to every challenge.
That came through especially clearly when he answered a question about how to involve staff in decisions about new tools without overwhelming them.
Rather than diving headfirst into AI, Tyler encouraged agencies to look first at what existing technology can already do.
He shared a simple but effective example from his own department. Using Escondido’s recreation management and communication tools, his team schedules automated reminders at key moments throughout a class session: when a participant enrolls, before a class begins, and again when the session ends so participants can complete a survey or reenroll.
“That’s not an AI tool. That’s just leveraging current technology. You don’t have to look to AI to solve every problem, especially if there are established tools that can help you solve some of the obvious ones right now.”
That mindset aligns strongly with the research itself. Responsible progress does not mean chasing every new capability. It means starting with the clearest needs and using the right level of technology to address them.
At the same time, Tyler gave a strong example of where AI can create real value.
He described using Google NotebookLM during a major RFP evaluation process for recreation management software. His team had to review 12 proposals, each roughly 25 pages long, against a set of critical evaluation criteria.
Rather than manually combing through hundreds of pages, Tyler used AI to upload the proposal PDFs and extract responses into a table organized by the criteria his team needed to compare.
“That was one of the most efficient uses of AI I’ve had recently. It helped summarize a large volume of information in a way that saved an extraordinary amount of time.”
At the same time, he was careful to note that AI did not remove the need for oversight.
“You still have to go back and verify the information. We all know these tools can hallucinate or give an answer that isn’t fully correct. So I don’t think we’re at a point where it’s totally trustworthy on its own.”
That balance is what made his example so compelling. Tyler was not describing AI as magic. He was describing it as a force multiplier — helpful for summarizing and accelerating work, but not a replacement for judgment.
One of the most thoughtful moments in the webinar came when Tyler was asked about AI use cases he finds especially interesting in Parks & Recreation and local government.
He mentioned Canva as a tool he uses frequently, but his explanation quickly turned to a broader point about authenticity in public-facing work.
“Where a lot of hesitation comes from is our craving for authenticity. We don’t want fake images, especially in Parks and Recreation.”
Tyler oversees Escondido’s recreation guide, and he made it clear that his team prioritizes real images over stock photography or obviously AI-generated content.
“The community wants to see themselves represented in your marketing. Even if people don’t always want their picture taken, they still want to know what they’re seeing is real.”
That observation echoes one of the clearest signals in our research: community members want digital experiences to remain personal and supportive, even as technology becomes more common.
For Tyler, that means AI can assist with templates, formatting, and efficiency — but the final output still has to feel authentic to the community being served.
When webinar attendees were asked what most often slows AI adoption in recreation organizations, the top response was privacy, ethics, and trust concerns.
Tyler’s comments made it clear that those concerns are not theoretical.
He emphasized that agencies need to think carefully about whether staff are entering sensitive information into open tools, and what risk that might create for the public.
“If someone is using an open AI tool and entering sensitive information, you could be putting your agency at risk. That’s why a policy matters — even if the policy is simply that AI should not be used in certain contexts.”
This is one of the clearest differences between Tyler’s municipal perspective and some broader conversations about AI adoption. In local government, experimentation cannot come at the expense of governance.
That does not mean progress has to stop. It means it needs to be structured.
When asked how he sees the future of AI unfolding in Parks & Recreation, Tyler’s answers suggested there won’t be one universal model.
Different agencies will likely move at different speeds, adopt different tools, and prioritize different use cases based on their internal needs, policies, and capacity.
That was reinforced in the broader panel discussion as well: some tools are better for research, some for content creation, some for data-heavy workflows, and some for automating tasks.
For Tyler, the right starting point is not the tool itself. It is the problem.
“Focus first on where you’re losing time, where you’re hitting operational bottlenecks, and what outcomes you’re actually trying to improve. That’s what should guide the conversation.”
That framing feels especially important for public agencies, where budgets, approvals, and cross-departmental coordination all play a role in what is realistic.
Tyler also shared a few practical resources he uses to stay informed as AI evolves, including The AI Daily Brief podcast and a government technology newsletter focused on public-sector use cases.
That recommendation may seem small, but it reflects a broader reality: for many Parks & Recreation leaders, part of responsible adoption is simply keeping up.
The pace of change in AI is fast, and Tyler repeatedly returned to the importance of understanding the landscape before committing to a direction.
That kind of disciplined curiosity may be one of the most important leadership skills in this moment.
Tyler’s comments reinforced many of the patterns we saw in the research, but they also brought an important local government lens to the discussion.
AI adoption in Parks & Recreation is not just about whether a tool is useful. It is also about whether it is secure, aligned with agency policy, appropriate for the task, and grounded in authentic service to the community.
His perspective points to a few practical takeaways for leaders:
Ultimately, Tyler’s message was not anti-AI. It was something more useful: be deliberate.
That may be the most important lesson for Parks & Recreation leaders right now.
Not every agency needs to move fast. But every agency should be thinking carefully about how to move well.
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