The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is leveraging the savings it generates from its transition to the cloud services to fund AI technology pilots, the agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Acting Chief AI Officer (CAIO) Guy Cavallo said Thursday.
During the Box Government Summit in D.C. on May 16, Cavallo said that he is giving his employees a $5,000 budget to test AI tools in sandboxes.
“I’m giving everybody about a $5,000 sandbox as the max that they can spend until I say, ‘I need more money from you,’” he said. “Because it wasn’t in the budget. I didn’t put AI in my budget two and a half years ago when I had to submit this budget – nobody did, we put $0 in our budget. So, I’m using some of our cloud savings to be able to fund sandboxes.”
Cavallo said he created an AI steering committee at OPM – in line with the White House’s AI executive order issued last year – to help approve or deny proof of concepts for AI tools.
“We implemented an online form that anybody can submit that they want to implement a proof of concept,” he continued, “[that] comes to the AI executive steering committee, we decide whether we’re going to approve it going forward.”
If they want to proceed with the proof of concept, it will then go to the pilot stage, but once developers hit the $5,000 budget, they have to come up with their own money, Cavallo said.
“A pilot stage means we’re going to formalize this more – you get to be more in line with what the production system would look like, bigger data sets,” he said. “If they stay within the $5,000, I’ll still pay for it. As soon as they hit $5,000, I’ve got to put my hand out because I don’t have funding to pay for it.”
If the AI pilot is a success, Cavallo said it will move to the production phase, but the program office will have to find its own money for this stage of the process.
“If they don’t have the money, we don’t approve,” he said.
The CIO said OPM is advertising a job opening for a chief AI technology lead, “who will work directly for me to help lead us through all of our proof of concepts and pilots and projects.”
It wouldn’t be a Guy Cavallo keynote without a mention of one of his recent cloud success stories.
Just this week, he said he moved USAJobs to the cloud.
“They used to be on-premise in Macon, Georgia,” he said. “It’s now in the cloud where it’s redundant, it’s running faster. And if any of you are applying for jobs, you’ll be applying to the cloud.”
“I really think if you want to use AI effectively, you need to be in the cloud. You don’t want to be pulling data out of silos from multiple servers spread across an agency,” Cavallo said. “If you can get your data to the cloud, your AI will work much more effectively for you.”
