Jonathan Finch, acting director for digital experience in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Federal CIO office, said today that OMB is evaluating the utility of artificial intelligence technologies as it looks to execute on multiple directives to improve how the government provides digital services to citizens.
Those policy directives include the President’s Management Agenda, President Biden’s 2021 executive order to transform Federal customer experience and service delivery, and more recent guidance from OMB on the continued implementation of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience (IDEA) Act.
“There’s certainly an opportunity to use AI in places to help with the customer experience to make it easier for folks to get answers to their questions,” Finch said during a webinar organized by ATARC.
“We’re actively exploring” the technology and helping Federal agencies “to think through what are the right uses of AI in that sense,” he said.
“I think the other thing that we’re cognizant of is that, as folks do use AI tools to try to get answers to information, it’s that much more important … to help folks think through … when is it authoritative information,” Finch said.
“That’s the part that we’re really focused on … when the public uses a tool to get an answer, we want them to be confident that that is the right answer for them, especially when it’s about accessing a government service or government benefits,” he said.
Elsewhere during the ATARC event, officials confirmed that Larry Bafundo has been named acting executive director of the General Services Administration (GSA) Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). He succeeds Jessie Posilkin, who was acting director but has since returned to her prior post as TMF’s customer experience portfolio director.
For the past two years, Bafundo held technology management positions at the Labor Department working on unemployment insurance systems modernization.
