Every content platform has AI in it now. Almost all of it is the same thing: a page editor with a button in the corner that will help you write a paragraph, if you ask it, while you are already in the editor doing the work.
That is a content management system with a feature stapled to it. It does not change who does the job. You still open the tool, still face the empty page, still assemble the site by hand. The button helps with the typing, and typing was never the hard part.
The software does the work. Your staff say yes or no.
That sentence is the whole design, and it points the other way.
Nobody starts from a blank page
Work in Baseline does not begin with somebody opening an editor. It begins with something turning up. A document from a board. An email you were forwarded. A date. One sentence typed into a box.
From that, the software works out what it is, which board it belongs to, what else it implies, and writes the result. The page, the headings, the summary, the photo descriptions, the calendar entry, the notice on the front page. What your staff get is not an editor. It is a draft and a decision.
If a screen in our product asks a Town Clerk to write something from nothing, we got that screen wrong and we would like to hear about it.
It starts before you are a customer
The most useful thing it can do for a town is the first thing: read the website you already have and rebuild it. Your departments, your boards, your content, standing up on Baseline before you have committed to anything.
Two reasons that matters. You should be able to judge a platform by looking at your own town rather than somebody else's demo. And the hard part of switching, the thing that keeps towns on software they dislike for the better part of a decade, becomes our problem instead of yours.
The jobs nobody gets to
Describing photos. Writing summaries. Translating. Noticing that last year's page is now wrong.
These are what gets dropped at four in the afternoon on a busy day, and they are also what gets a town in trouble. They are exactly what a machine is good at. It is the least exciting argument for AI in government software and probably the strongest one.
Now the catch
Software that writes most of your website had better not be able to write a broken one. Otherwise you have automated the problem and made it faster.
So nothing here writes the underlying code. Not your staff and not the AI. Both work with pieces we built and checked first. The software cannot invent a heading structure, cannot pick a color, cannot hand-roll a widget. It has a vocabulary, and everything in that vocabulary was tested before it ever got used.
That is a real constraint and we are not apologising for it. It is the thing that makes the rest safe to ship.
And a person still says yes
Nothing the software produces goes public on its own.
Every piece of a page knows whether a person wrote it, the software drafted it, or a person edited a draft. You see what changed before you approve it. The sign-off follows whatever your bylaws actually say rather than something we invented. And we keep track of how much of a page came from the machine, because a town publishing this kind of content should be able to answer that question if somebody asks.
A town gets held to account in ways a business does not. Software that quietly reworded a page of bylaws is not a bug you file on Monday. It is a phone call from your attorney. So approval is something we advertise rather than something we apologise for.