“AI,” aka artificial intelligence, seems to be all around us and closing in fast. So fast that Colorado was among the first states last year to regulate the technology. After all, AI promises to revolutionize our lives.

Wall Street Journal tech reporter Joanna Stern wrote from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that AI seemed to be on everyone’s mind there even as political and business leaders in attendance huddled on putatively more pressing global matters.

Stern got some tech sector honchos at the summit to speculate for her when they thought AI might surpass human capabilities; one thought two to three years while another said maybe even sooner. And Stern profiled some of the latest AI breakthroughs, like “AI agent,” which soon will write and test computer code and interact with co-workers about it.

Without a doubt, AI is big. That much, our state’s lawmakers understood when they passed Senate Bill 24-205 last spring, governing the development and use of the technology in Colorado. Yet, their effort has drawn high-profile pushback from the start, with critics saying it overreaches and falls short.

AI is in fact too big for our part-time Legislature to take on by itself. Not just for the current crop of lawmakers but, in general, for an elected body that seats far more lawyers than techies.

That’s why The Gazette editorial board urges Gov. Jared Polis to impanel a special task force on the subject — ASAP. It could include lawmakers but also, above all, AI experts from the tech world to help navigate our Legislature’s next steps. That includes assessing whether the state government, rather than Washington, should be involved in AI regulation in the first place.

Indeed, the ink barely had dried on Polis’ signature on the bill in May before the governor was expressing misgivings. Polis, joined by Attorney General Phil Weiser and Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez — the bill’s prime sponsor in the state Senate — wrote a letter to the business community in June acknowledging the measure’s flaws.

As Colorado Politics reported at the time, Polis vowed to revise the new law amid worries by businesses that it would stifle innovation without resolving the problems it sought to remedy. This month, a tech sector leader and AI expert in our state penned a Sunday Perspective for The Gazette similarly urging that the law be amended.

SB24-205 focused to a significant degree on countering “algorithmic discrimination” — a debatable concern that became the tail wagging the dog for the Legislature’s equity-obsessed ruling Democrats. AI is of course about so much more. Overcorrecting one perceived problem could create a lot of other problems in developing and implementing the technology.

As lawmakers now attempt to fix the flaws in last year’s bill, it’s also worth considering whether the problem with Colorado’s approach is even more fundamental. Notably — as argued all along by some critics of the state’s effort — whether federal regulation is what’s truly needed.

Last summer’s letter to the business community from Polis and his fellow VIPs acknowledged a “state by state patchwork of regulation” poses “challenges to the cultivation of a strong technology sector.”

Colorado’s 7th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, who sits on Congress’ new, bipartisan AI Working Group, recently told Colorado Politics a “national standard,” hammered out through federal action in Congress, makes the most sense.

Our state, led by its higher ed institutions and tech sector, is on course to become a global epicenter of quantum technology — pivotal to the development of AI. It’s crucial that Colorado gets it right.

At the very least, provisions in last year’s bill that might smother innovation need to be amended. But Colorado’s lawmakers also need to know if they should back out of regulation and leave it to Congress.

Our state’s policymakers urgently need to hear from the experts.