Talbot County’s August 21 comprehensive-plan session will include Economic Development and Tourism. Earlier this year, the county’s Business Appreciation Summit framed artificial intelligence as an urgent local economic-development issue.
Those conversations should meet.
As local firms adopt AI, they should measure net work rather than first-pass speed. A tool that drafts a customer message in seconds may still create checking, correction, exception handling, or downstream repair for someone else.
A simple 30-day rework test can make that visible. Pick one recurring workflow. Record the baseline time and outcome. Then track first-pass time saved, verification time, corrections, customer callbacks, and problems that require escalation.
For consequential decisions involving prices, contracts, hiring, safety, or public claims, keep a named human owner for the final call.
Talbot businesses do not need to choose between growth and caution. They need evidence about which workflows actually improve. As the county plans for its economic future, that habit can help firms scale useful automation without mistaking transferred work for productivity.
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, a behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026).
One Response
What specifically are the hidden costs? Businesses will adopt AI whether local politicians or or bureaucratic planners like it or not. The issue is not use of AI but rather recruiting and developing AI talent into the local economy. Like any new tech, there are benefits and costs which the commercial sector will weigh. Talbot needs to hanelp local schools, businesses, and not-for-profits to embrace AI to build a critical mass of talent.