Information and Communication Technologies (lCT) have generally been leveraged by various organizations, including public institutions, to enhance their institutional capacities. ICTs allow organizations, among other benefits, to make internal processes more efficient and provide people with the means to access and utilize information. ChatGPT, an emerging form of Artificial Intelligence (Al) technology, is a promising ICT tool that has the capacity to assist organizations. It utilizes a natural language processing (NLP) system trained on a large dataset of conversations, particularly through Machine Learning (ML). This enables users to converse with its platform, generating human-like conversations and providing responses to a wide range of queries and instructions, including those that are creative and technical in nature. With its functions, ChatGPT has been applied in various domains, including the analysis of patient data in healthcare and medicine, the automation of financial report generation in business and finance, the development of legal advice chatbots in law and legal services, and the creation of personalized learning materials in education and training. The use of ChatGPT can particularly help governments that are usually plagued with institutional capacity limitations, especially in developing countries. However, there have been impediments surrounding the acceptability of ChatGPT among public institutions including issues related to security, employee resistance, resource needs, and usability. There have also been concerns regarding the quality and accuracy of the data that are used to train ChatGPT, along with challenges in terms of lack of transparency and interpretability of ChatGPT's decision-making process. As such, this study aims to contribute to this area by exploring the acceptability of ChatGPT, focusing specifically on local governments in the Philippines. The study will concentrate on local development planning, an administrative function which local governments in the country often find challenging to comply with due to its highly technical nature and the limitations in their institutional capacities. The findings of this study can therefore provide practical value as the findings can potentially help promote the adoption and use of ChatGPT among local governments, augmenting their institutional capacities for formulating development plans. The study will generally follow the framework by Belanche et al. (2012)² which integrates trust into the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that considers perceived usefulness and ease-of-use as primary factors influencing acceptability. The integration of trust is important to address not only the technical aspects but also the political dimensions of local development planning. Data will be collected primarily through survey questionnaires and key informant interviews (KII) among local development planning experts, and practitioners, as well as local legislators, as local development plans require approval from local councils. Data processing and analysis will mainly employ a qualitative approach, using descriptive and thematic analysis methods.