Federal government experts today said that while artificial intelligence is still an “elusive” technology to many, agencies can start to build trust in AI by using it to tackle employees’ pain points.
At the Red Hat Government Symposium in Washington, D.C., today, Akanksha Sharma, the director of digital transformation at the Department of Labor (DoL) said that her agency has seen success by using the tech for “low value, redundant processes.”
“A big area where we’ve seen success is as we’ve been moving from paper to electronic filing and case management, embedding artificial intelligence at the right points there so that our case managers are able to make decisions faster so that they have more accurate data and insights to act on,” Sharma said. “That’s been really critical.”
She added that her agency is looking to continue to build trust in AI by making sure its employees understand AI, and then looking at “What are the processes that maybe drive them crazy? What are the things that take them a long time to do? And start to automate.”
Frank La Vigne, the global GTM (go-to-market) lead for data services at Red Hat and moderator of the conversation, noted that targeting redundant tasks is “an excellent place for anyone to start.”
“We all have one thing in common: paperwork,” La Vigne said. “Most people are not exactly big fans of doing all that paperwork and case management, things like that. AI can actually take away a lot of workload.”
Over at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Dr. Spencer Schaefer, AI solutions architect at the VA National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII), said that his agency has increased collaboration while looking at potential use cases for AI.
For example, he said his agency is having more internal department meetings to discuss the emerging technology – something it didn’t do in the past.
“I think that one thing coming out of this is we’re really starting to see genuine collaboration, because we all know that there’s too much at risk,” Dr. Schaefer said. “It’s pulling us together in ways it hasn’t before.”
Another positive, he said is that “we’re all experiencing the same pace” with the emerging technology, enabling agencies can share information “back and forth.”
“This is a huge cultural shift that’s going to happen across the board, especially once we start getting into that conversation of how does this affect the larger American workforce, the one that doesn’t work in technology that maybe doesn’t understand technology, and is threatened by technology,” Sharma said.
“I think it’s important for us to get ahead of some of the ethics conversations and responsibility conversations as a government entity,” she added.
Maj. Gen. David W. Abba, the director of Special Programs and the director of the Department of Defense (DoD) Special Access Program Central Office, U.S. Air Force, agreed, adding that AI can be framed in three ways: people, process, and policies.
“I think we have some semblance of an idea of what we need out of the people. We have some semblance of an idea of what we need out of the processes and the policies,” Abba said. “But this elusive tech evolution that we’re all chasing makes the interplay of these three things, very, very challenging, and it is very disruptive to the way that we’ve traditionally done business inside of the department, so a really exciting time.”
