ABSTRACT. The study examines the roles of artificial intelligence (AI) in municipal service decision making. It is concerned with openness, responsibility and trust to nations. Municipal services entail such things as waste disposal, city planning and citizen assistance. Chatbots, predictive machines, etc. are AI tools that help to make such services quicker and more productive. As an illustration, AI can minimize expenditures to shorten the time of responding to people requests. Nonetheless, challenges come along with AI. There is a fear among several individuals that the decisions of AI are difficult to comprehend or unjust. The paper evaluates the literature on the AI in administration. It demonstrates that the implementation of AI is constantly increasing across the globe, and such techniques also have more advantages, such as an increased use of data and automation. Nevertheless, obscure algorithms, a lack of accountability, and other matters tend to lower the trust. Analysis results that although AI is efficient, the lack of communication and management costs accountability and faith. Municipalities should clarify AI procedures and introduce powerful scrutiny to resolve this. The paper offers design parameters in morally acceptable utilization of AI to create equal load of profit and dangers. To sum it up, municipal services can be enhanced with the use of AI. This however will only work when transparency and accountability is built. This makes citizens to trust their governments at the local levels. These ideas should be tried in actual cities (particularly, smaller cities with limited resources) in the future. These issues are solved; thus, AI can support the population in a good and equitable way.

Keywords: AI in municipal services; transparency; accountability; citizen trust; public administration; ethical AI; decision-making

How to cite: Manole, C., Poliakova, A., and Pârvu, I.-A. (2023). “Artificial Intelligence-powered Decision-Making in Municipal Services: Transparency, Accountability, and Citizen Trust,” Smart Governance 2(3): 52–67. doi: 10.22381/sg2320234.

Received 10 April 2023 • Received in revised form 20 September 2023
Accepted 27 September 2023 • Available online 28 September 2023