In the past year alone, the Federal government has been thrown headlong into the hype cycle of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, a phenomenon a top tech official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called an “AI tsunami.”
In order to protect themselves from the storm – innovating with AI tools while keeping the risks at bay – agencies must provide data education and training for their workforces, Deputy Chief Data Officer and Director of AI within DHS’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) component, Trang Tran, said.
“We’re in a world of what I’m going to call an AI tsunami. It’s AI everywhere,” Tran said during ATARC’s 2023 CIO Summit in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13. “How does that impact you? So, it has the same effect at an agency.”
“I think one of the things that we have to do as an agency is what I’m going to call educating the workforce, training the workforce,” she said.
“How many of them understand their role in data, how they use data? How does AI impact that? AI is only a tool, it is not something that will replace any human,” Tran said. “It won’t replace our officers and agents out in the field; it won’t replace what they’re doing; it won’t replace any intuition that they may have, but it’s a tool to help them leverage and make their work a little bit more efficient, effective and they have to understand that.”
Tran said that CBP is fortunate to have “top-down support from our management” in deploying better workforce education and training with data and AI.
For example, Tran said CBP has AI days, where the agency educates its employees on what AI is and what it is not. She also said that CBP highly encourages its workforce to attend tech conferences so they can learn how industry and other government agencies are leveraging the tool.
“One of our main goals in our data strategy is the workforce talent and cultivation and understanding and education and making them understand where they fit in, and how data is being used because they have to understand where they fit in in order to better manage the data that they have,” Tran said.
She highlighted that currently, CBP is using AI technologies at U.S. borders to help alert agents of threat vectors and detect illegal border crossings.
“We’re integrating sensor technology as well as AI to aggregate the data to alert as far as ‘Hey, is there some threat vector that’s coming, or do I have a person that’s crossing the border that they’re not supposed to?’ So, AI will help us detect some of that stuff,” Tran said. “When you’re looking at an officer or an agent sitting at the border in the field, they’re looking at multiple screens. How can we make that a little bit more efficient for them?”
Alexis Bonnell, the chief information officer and director of the Digital Capabilities Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory, highlighted that her team has started toil calculations – a tool that helps them better understand how much time a new piece of technology can save.
Bonnell said they use it as a “prioritization tool to understand what we’re going to tackle first.”
“It really outlines, for us at least, how much is this problem worth to us, how much is this problem worth from a time standpoint, from an adversarial advantage standpoint, and just from a keeping … people standpoint,” she said.
The CIO also highlighted how the Air Force Research Laboratory has employed a “cadre” of people dubbed Digital Allies. According to Bonnell, these people sit down with leaders and help them understand the benefits on the mission of leveraging technologies, including tools like generative AI.
“What was magical for us is just having that person in your corner with a little bit of bandwidth to help you think it through,” she said. “Our goal was to increase their confidence and to move them to be able to make a decision. That is not a technology challenge. It’s having empathy for each other as leaders and being what is it that we need? What is the ally you need to make that decision to have more confidence?”
