Government is understandably excited about the potential for AI to elevate constituent services and enhance mission outcomes. But AI needs data — lots of data — to understand patterns and deliver intelligible guidance to federal workers.
With this in mind, “the modernization challenge really revolves around making sure that data is prepared, accessible and ready to be used,” said Dom Delmolino, Vice President, Technology Solutions Architectures, at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
At the same time, government modernization teams must ensure that their infrastructure upgrades deliver deeper insights into end-user needs. “We can sprinkle AI everywhere, but what if you don’t know who it is you’re interacting with?” said Adilson Jardim, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President, Public Sector Solutions Engineering.
In government, “there are silos of data everywhere,” Jardim said. To bring AI to life, agencies need a modern environment that enables them to understand “who it is that’s engaging with you through your service delivery.”
Putting AI to Work
As agency leaders tackle these hurdles, they need to think about the desired outcomes and how AI can add value to the mission.
In terms of constituent service, that might mean using AI to better manage the “crush of calls” that can roll into a government service center, Jardim said.
For instance, suppose a new federal benefit becomes available. “We’re talking about potentially 20, 30 or 40 million people trying to register for a service or a benefit that we didn’t have a week before,” he said. That scalability “is where we see the potential value of AI helping.”
Another promising area is in the use of AI for intelligent document processing. Agencies now can leverage AI to “analyze and use the data that’s been locked up in some of those paper-based workflows,” Delmolino said. “We’re starting to see real adoption and success there.”
Jardim pointed to several agencies that already use these capabilities. The Internal Revenue Service uses AI to streamline tax submissions and reduce the need for human interventions, he said. And education agencies are tapping AI to more effectively sort through vast numbers of grant applications, an effort that previously required extensive human labor.
Across a range of government functions, “when we take AI and we put it in the hands of the people who have to do the work, we make them so much more productive,” Delmolino said. “These tools help them do their job faster, do it more quickly, do it more accurately.”
All that starts with data. “Is there a tangible problem that we can solve for? And what’s the data that is ultimately required to solve for that problem?” Jardim said. When agencies can answer those questions, they’re well on the road to realizing the benefits of AI.
This article appears in our guide, “Getting Practical with AI.” For more examples of how agencies are making real-world use of AI technology, download it here:
