AI in St. Paul, Minnesota

St. Paul, Minnesota by the numbers

US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2023, Ramsey County.

Population

544,438

Median household income

$81,004

Unemployment rate

4.7%

Largest industry

Education/Health Services

Share in that industry

27.7%

Poverty rate

12.1%

Median home value

$304,900

Read the full AI ethics guide for Ramsey County

Government

• SPPD Policy 236.06 — Generative Artificial Intelligence

  Effective 17 October 2025, applying to all St. Paul Police Department personnel using approved GenAI tools. The department states plainly that GenAI can produce unintended discriminatory or biased output as well as inaccurate, misleading or copyrighted content, and that its use must therefore be strictly regulated. A policy that names its own technology's failure modes in the introduction is unusual and sets up everything that follows.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• Three data risk tiers defined against MGDPA Chapter 13

  Low risk is data the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act defines as public. Moderate risk is anything that is not low risk, including system security information and not-public names, addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses. High risk covers protected health information, criminal justice information, Social Security and driver's licence numbers, federal tax information and bank account data. Employees may use low-risk data with GenAI and must prevent moderate or high-risk data reaching it.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• Draft material only, and not presented as original work

  AI-generated content is an informational tool and not a substitute for human judgment or decision-making; it is to be treated as draft material and thoroughly reviewed before use; and personnel should not represent it as their original work. Subject matter experts must verify output is accurate, complete, unbiased and not a violation of anyone's intellectual property, and obtain independent sources for facts it supplies.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• Disclosure to the public, at the employee's discretion

  Personnel should inform the public when work has been generated by AI and include a statement in the final work product, but it is left to the employee to judge when that is appropriate. Recorded with its limitation intact: a discretionary disclosure duty is materially weaker than a mandatory one, and this is the clause most likely to be tested first.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• Saint Paul public safety drone programme

  The City states drones are deployed only for calls for service and not for general surveillance, that all flights are logged, documented and auditable, and that video is retained for seven days under state statute unless classified as evidence. A stated retention period with a statutory basis is what makes an audit possible; without one, a logging commitment records only what someone chose to keep.

  Source: City of Saint Paul · verified November 2026

• A data-classification rule governing AI use

  The core guidance is that AI tools should only be used with data classified as Public unless specifically approved, and that University-licensed tools should be used to protect both the user and the institution. Tying AI permission to an existing data classification scheme is the cheapest workable rule, and any Ramsey County organisation that already classifies its data can adopt it tomorrow.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Procurement

• Axon Auto-Transcribe as the only permitted tool for report narratives

  Authorised personnel may use Axon Auto-Transcribe, which applies generative AI to body-worn camera and interview audio, to draft the narrative portion of official reports — and are not permitted to use any AI tool from any other provider for narrative content. Official reports include police report narratives, supplemental narratives, warrant affidavits and statements. Naming one vendor and extending the rule to warrant affidavits is the most specific position any city in this file has taken.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• Private and public AI tools, distinguished by what trains the model

  The policy defines private AI tools as ones whose data is segmented from other training data and accessible only inside the organisation, and public tools as openly available services that use customer data to train the underlying model and do not guarantee privacy, naming Gemini, ChatGPT and Grammarly. Drawing the line at what trains the model, rather than at price or brand, is the distinction that actually predicts where data ends up.

  Source: Saint Paul Police Department · verified November 2026

• A named list of licensed AI tools

  The university licenses Gemini with the Google AI Pro add-on, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Notebook and Zoom AI Companion, alongside AI resources at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Naming the licensed set publicly is what lets staff know where the line is, and a Ramsey County employer that cannot answer the same question has not really set a policy.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Organization

• Institute for AI for the Common Good, University of St. Thomas

  A multidisciplinary institute in St. Paul led by Provost Eddy Rojas, focused on how AI impacts human life, ethical values and societal norms, guided by the Catholic intellectual tradition. An institute whose organising question is the effect on human life rather than the capability of the technology is a genuinely different starting point, and it is a mile from the department that wrote the policy above.

  Source: University of St. Thomas · verified November 2026

• Macalester College Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science

  Macalester, in St. Paul, offers majors in computer science, data science, mathematics and statistics, with coursework spanning Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Projects in Data Science, Network Science, Statistical Genetics and Computer Security and Privacy. A liberal arts department teaching AI alongside security and privacy produces graduates who ask a different set of questions than a pure engineering pipeline does.

  Source: Macalester College · verified November 2026

• An AI Makerspace and custom agents built in-house

  The College of Science and Engineering runs an AI Makerspace, and the university supports custom agents built as Gems in Gemini with published guidance for instructors. Building custom agents in-house rather than adopting whatever a vendor ships is what lets an institution decide what a tool will and will not do, which is a choice a Ramsey County organisation rarely realises it has.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

• The University of Minnesota AI Hub

  The Data Science and AI Hub is transitioning into an AI Hub, with Vlad Griskevicius directing teaching and learning and James C. Wilgenbusch directing research, supported by AI resources at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Splitting the directorship between teaching and research rather than appointing one head is a structural admission that the two need different answers, which is useful for Ramsey County to notice before writing a single policy for both.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Training

• Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, St. Thomas School of Engineering

  The applied counterpart to the ethics institute, sitting within the graduate software programmes at the University of St. Thomas. Having both an ethics institute and an applied centre at the same university in the same city is the combination a local employer needs, since the question is rarely only whether a system works or only whether it should be used.

  Source: University of St. Thomas · verified November 2026

• AI at Macalester College — institutional guidance

  Macalester publishes its own guidance on AI use through Information Technology Services. Alongside the University of St. Thomas institute and applied centre, it means a St. Paul employer has three separate institutions in the city that have already had to answer what may be entered into a tool, by whom, and with what data.

  Source: Macalester College · verified November 2026

• GenAI+U, an AI literacy initiative for students, instructors and staff

  The university runs GenAI+U to give trusted guidance on understanding and using AI responsibly, through videos, resources and learning opportunities aimed separately at students, instructors and staff. Trusted is the word doing the work: most AI guidance a Ramsey County resident encounters is written by someone selling something, and a public university has no such interest.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Case study

• Named guidance documents, including one on grant proposals

  The university publishes Appropriate Use of Generative AI Tools, Gems in Gemini: Guidance for Instructors, and a Guide for Safely Using AI to Develop Grant Proposals. The last is the unusual one: writing a funding application with these tools raises questions about authorship and disclosure that most institutions have not addressed at all, and any Ramsey County body applying for grants faces the same problem.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Event

• A dense August programme, including AI and Academic Integrity

  Sessions run through August 2026 including The AI-Powered Admin, EmpowerMN CS+AI, AI-Resilient Assessments with FeedbackFruits, AI and Academic Integrity, Crafting Your AI Syllabus Statement, Designing AI-Aware Assignments, and academic research projects in the age of AI. AI-resilient assessment is the honest framing of a problem Ramsey County schools and colleges have right now, and these sessions are dated and public.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

• AI Quests, a systemwide community of practice, and the WiADS conference

  AI Quests pairs faculty and staff with skilled students to build custom AI tools, a systemwide AI Community of Practice meets monthly and is open to any member of the university, and the WiADS conference runs in October 2026 for researchers, students and practitioners. Monthly and open is the combination that makes a community of practice reachable from Ramsey County rather than nominal.

  Source: University of Minnesota · verified November 2026

Other MN markets

• Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Rochester, Minnesota

Questions about AI in St. Paul, Minnesota

Guides that apply anywhere, including St. Paul, Minnesota

The rules differ by place; the questions to ask do not.

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• AI Governance: What It Is, and What It Actually Requires AI governance is not a document, a committee, or a platform. It is the answer to a specific question: when som...
• Securing AI Systems and Agents "AI security" covers four unrelated problems, and the one most people mean depends on which kind of AI they ac...
• AI Vendor Risk Assessment: A Buyer’s Checklist Most AI vendor questionnaires are published by vendors, which means they ask the questions vendors are comfort...