Should a serious boiler accident occur on one of New York’s last steam trains, state law requires operators to notify the Department of Transportation as promptly as possible, but only by phone — or telegram.

Organizations looking to amend their charitable bingo licenses must remember to print out three copies of their application to the Gaming Commission. Those hoping to appeal Department of Conservation findings on wetlands will need six.

And despite the widespread access to email, there are more than 350 instances where the law requires documents to be transmitted via fax or the United States Postal Service.

These are just a few of the outdated and burdensome requirements flagged in a new artificial intelligence project ordered up by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The effort, called Regulatory Reset, will deploy A.I. to comb though roughly 18 million words of codified statute to find references to fees; signature or notary requirements; fax, mail, telegraph and other outdated technologies; as well as task forces, councils and mandatory reports.

“We have laws on the books that require a special permit for a woman to work later hours,” Ms. Hochul said in an interview. “No wonder people get so frustrated. So I’m getting rid of that.”

In an executive order that will be signed on Wednesday, Ms. Hochul will call for state agencies to modernize or eliminate obsolete regulations. As part of the effort, the state already solicited suggestions from agencies and the public and collected more than 4,000 submissions — many of which mention the absurdity of maintaining a fax machine in 2026.

The order calls for state agencies to review the examples found by the A.I. tools, created in collaboration with the civic tech organization Recoding America and Stanford University, to see what rules can be eliminated or modified.

“A.I. is not the decision maker,” the governor said. “Every single action we take will be proposed and vetted by human experts across state government.”

It’s an idea that Ms. Hochul says has been percolating since her days as Erie County clerk — when she saw firsthand how onerous requirements and unnecessary fees frustrated people trying to go about their daily lives.

“People have lost confidence in their state to be able to deliver the way they want it to,” Ms. Hochul said in an interview on Tuesday. “My philosophy is government should be on your side, not on your back.”

“We have to shake it all up — be creative, and rethink government on a daily basis,” she added.

The announcement comes amid other attempts at improving government efficiency. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a commission to review the city charter to make city government more efficient. At the federal level, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, aimed to reduce spending broadly through mass firings, with mixed results.

Watching the Trump administration’s effort has been instructive, Ms. Hochul said. “I’d been working on this before that started, and I said we have to do the opposite,” she said.

And while New York has made efforts to deregulate — the Government Office of Regulatory Reform in 1993, and the SAGE commission in 2011 — this project is the first widespread use of A.I. tools to help revamp government.

“I have not seen anything like an executive order that really kick-starts a process like this, and commits to untangling the bureaucracy to move forward,” said Prof. Daniel Ho, who directs the Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab at Stanford that helped create the A.I. tools.

Professor Ho had already been working on a review of mandatory reports, councils and task forces in states across the country when New York approached him about a partnership. He was enthusiastic, in part because of New York’s extensive reporting requirements and its almost inexplicable love of task forces and councils.

There’s the report prepared annually on children who hunt deer, or the McCarthy-era annual report on what measures are being taken to enforce laws against subversive teachers in public schools, which remains on the books despite being declared unconstitutional in 1967.

Some of these reports are important — regardless of how many people read them, Professor Ho said. But others are mere vestiges of a bygone era.

“If we take up all of the time in the civil service to write a bunch of reports that very few people read, that may not be the highest value use, and may actually also be demoralizing for folks who have to work on those reports,” he said.

There is also a nine-member council devoted to advising on the state of sour cherries, and a World War I-era commission on textbooks containing seditious or disloyal subject matter.

While the elimination of some of these artifacts might seem like no-brainer decisions, it will be a multistep process. The agencies will first examine the results of the A.I. reviews and decide on changes they can make themselves. Then Ms. Hochul will include the changes that need legislative approval as part of her legislative agenda for the coming year.

The Hochul administration insists that people with subject matter expertise across state government will have input on what happens next, unlike what happened with the DOGE effort. The Hochul administration says the technology will be used to empower those who know the details on the ground.

The goal, Ms. Hochul said, was to “remove that narrative that New York is hostile to business or an unfriendly place to operate.”

She added, “I want that people have a very different viewpoint of their government that is there for them.”