UNDERSTANDING THE MOTIVATIONS BEHIND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) ADOPTION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF POLITICIANS AND MANAGERS

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to transform administrative and political practices at the local level. However, the literature still offers limited empirical evidence on how local managers and politicians perceive this change, which motivations drive their adoption of AI technologies, and how they form future expectations. This study examines AI adoption in a municipality in Türkiye’s Eastern Anatolia Region through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as an analytic lens. We selected 12 municipal managers and council members through purposive sampling, conducted semi-structured interviews, and analyzed the data in MAXQDA with a hybrid thematic analysis (deductive-inductive). The analysis indicates that participants define AI through digital assistant/anthropomorphic assistant metaphors and also as an algorithmic tool. Moreover, awareness of hallucination, lack of consciousness, and limitations in creativity make trust conditional. Motivations that drive AI use include strengthening administrative capacity, speeding up service delivery, working with big data, and improving operational efficiency and reducing cognitive load. Actual use concentrates on information-intensive workflows, especially text-document production, legal/analytic research, and reporting. Meanwhile, they frame AI use with calibrated caution because of trust-control-accuracy concerns and risks such as manipulation, cognitive atrophy, and professional substitution. This study analyses the motivations of local managers and politicians to use AI through qualitative data, and it argues that researchers need to analyze technology acceptance beyond perceived individual benefits by also considering institutional responsibility, risk perception, and the governance context.