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Economic developers in small municipalities are experimenting with general-purpose AI tools. The drafts are often well-written. The sentences flow. The structure is logical. And then someone asks the question that ends the conversation: where did these numbers come from?
According to Localintel's 2026 survey of over 200 economic developers across Canada and the United States, 75% are already using AI tools regularly or occasionally to help create content. Their biggest concerns: accuracy and the risk of errors (77%), and sourcing and credibility (65%).
Those aren't concerns about writing quality. They're concerns about what happens when the content needs to leave someone's inbox.
The problem isn't the AI
General-purpose AI tools can produce fluent, well-structured content. The problem isn't their writing ability, it's the data underneath what they write.
These tools pull from wherever they can. Scraped web content. Training data with no traceable origin. Figures that may have been accurate at some point, in some context, for some jurisdiction. When an AI generates a workforce statistic or a demographic claim for your community, it can be a challenge to verify where that figure came from or whether it still applies.
For most content, that's a manageable trade-off. But for economic development content that goes in front of council, into a grant application, onto an investment attraction page, or into the hands of a site selector – the bar is higher.
"The AI generated it" is not a defensible answer in a council chamber. It is not a citation a grant body will accept. It is not the kind of sourcing a site selector trusts when evaluating a community.
The bar economic development content has to clear
Economic development content occupies unusual territory. It represents the community publicly. It carries the organization's credibility. It gets used in contexts where someone may push back, challenge a figure, or ask for the source.
That's a higher bar than a marketing email or an internal summary. The accuracy and sourcing concerns that economic developers consistently flag about AI tools aren't about writing quality at all – they're about this bar. The content may read well, but it cannot be published until someone has verified what it says, and with general-purpose AI, that verification often takes more time than starting from scratch.
The result is a predictable pattern: AI-assisted drafts that circulate internally, get held up at the review stage, and eventually get rewritten or shelved because no one can trace the underlying figures.
What actually addresses it
The issue is not that economic developers are using AI incorrectly. The issue is that general-purpose AI is built for a different job.
The alternative isn't abandoning AI. It's starting from a different foundation.
Localintel's content platform is built on a governed data layer, combining official government sources and curated third-party datasets, with AI doing the production work on top of that foundation. The data is verified before content is produced, not sourced during or after. When the platform generates a workforce summary, a demographic profile, or a community overview, the underlying figures are traceable to their original sources.
For economic developers in small municipalities, this changes the review step entirely. Staff aren't verifying data that arrived with no origin, they're reviewing structured content built from data they can point to. The AI did the production work. The sourcing was already in place.
The outputs aren't just usable drafts. They're ready for review in the same way a consultant's report would be, with the provenance that government content requires.
The practical question
If you have tried general-purpose AI tools and run into the same sourcing problem, it's worth asking whether the issue is the tool or the data layer underneath it.
Localintel works with small municipalities across the US and Canada. To see what the platform looks like for your community, and what content is already available, our team is happy to show you.
Book a demo: www.localintel.com/demo
