The adoption of AI technology will play an essential part in delivering a “frictionless experience” to United States Postal Service (USPS) customers, according to a top agency official.
Pritha Mehra, chief information officer (CIO) at the USPS, discussed the need for the agency to adopt AI technology as well as chart out how the agency will develop the technology for its own use cases during the Cloud Summit event on Oct. 19, hosted by NextGov/FCW.
“You have to bring machine learning and AI into the fold. And we have to do it responsibly, being a government organization,” said Mehra.
“So, we’ve set up a group where we are actually defining the principles and the management strategies around … using machine learning in many different ways. [Including,] language learning models for call centers, predicted delivery models for telling you where your package is, and when you’re expecting to get it,” she added.
Another use case in which the agency uses AI and ML technologies is to find fraudsters who have not purchased stamps for envelopes and packages and placed them in delivery boxes.
“We’re using some pretty advanced machine learning techniques to know whether this is a package that we should go after or not,” said Mehra.
While AI and ML technology have proven helpful for the agency, Mehra furthered the discussion by adding that to create these practical AI tools, the agency has adopted a sandbox approach.
“We have created sandboxes in our organization. Immediately, we’re employing it for things like code assist, testing, and understanding what your legacy code does. It’s pretty cool,” she said.
Mehra concluded by indicating that they “don’t believe [they’re] going to open it up to the public anytime soon,” to use or test out the AI tools they are working on at the agency.
“We already have a lot of it in our environment when it comes to machine learning, and I do believe that that’s going to help us moving forward,” said Mehra.
