Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, September 15th. Today on Forbes, this billionaire's

AI was supposed to speed up policing. It's not going well. In June 2022 in California, the San

Mateo County Sheriff's Office organized what they called a, quote, day of fun, down at

the Coyote Point shooting range.

The department's IT team and staff from C3 AI, a 2.4 billion dollar market cap company

founded by billionaire Tom Siebel, were invited to celebrate their work on a new surveillance

system intended to unify police data from agencies

across the county into a single app.

After lunch, C3 AI staff could practice shooting targets at the same facility where the cops

trained.

The choice of venue was not accidental.

In 2018, Siebel's Foundation gave $4.5 million to the county to fund the range's refurbishment.

Working closely with C3A.I. and its longtime partner, Amazon Web Services,

the Sheriff's Office wanted to connect masses of data from at least 15 different agencies under its jurisdiction,

collected from devices like license plate readers,

surveillance cameras, arrest records, 911 calls, and historical police databases.

At the core of Project Sherlock, named for Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective, was

artificial intelligence that could piece the data together, find leads for investigators,

and give situational awareness to cops on the beat. The ultimate aim was to dramatically speed up

the grunt work of policing. For C3 AI, Sherlock was set to be a flagship contract for the

company's local government division. And so crucial was it that Siebel himself was deeply involved in the early stages of the

work, down to writing sections of the contract and hosting San Mateo Cops at his offices

...