The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced its latest innovation in artificial intelligence, a chatbot that the agency calls DHSChat.
The agency shared that its AI chatbot is designed for internal use among the agency’s 19,000 employees – and an additional select few pilot users across 10 agencies – and was developed by the DHS AI Corps and its director, Michael Boyce. The chatbot draws inspiration from commercially available generative AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude, Boyce wrote in a Dec. 17 blog post.
DHSChat operates within a secure environment and assists employees with routine work, such as summarizing complex documents, generating computer code, and streamlining repetitive tasks like data entry.
“With this new tool, thousands of employees will be able to leverage generative AI capabilities safely and securely using non-public data,” wrote Boyce.
“In the future, we hope to create a secure internal knowledge hub, which staff can query for information about DHS policies, data, and other internal information,” he continued.
The chatbot builds upon an AI roadmap released by DHS earlier this year, which encouraged agency employees to responsibly use commercial GenAI products to prepare its workforce “for the future.” DHSChat was developed after several months of weekly training sessions on how to use GenAI responsibly, performing a privacy impact assessment, establishing rules of behavior, and developing the training for employees.
“By collaborating with cloud, cybersecurity, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties experts across the Department, DHS developed guardrails for DHSChat to ensure that it is effective, safe, secure and responsible,” wrote Boyce.
Some of the chatbot’s use cases shared in the announcement include enhancing grant program communications by increasing work capacity up to 25 percent, simplifying cyber terminology for employees, designing training programs to save time and improve their quality, and creating study aids for the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Risk Management Framework.
DHSChat is just one of 20 AI-related projects that the DHS AI Corps has worked on since its creation this spring. Currently, DHS has 29 AI use cases deployed with an additional 10 still yet to launch.
