Tips for Your Agency to Begin and Cultivate Your AI Journey

This blog post is an excerpt from our recent online course created in partnership with Dell, Modernizing Your IT Infrastructure to Power Artificial Intelligence in Government. Access the free course here.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are unlocking the value of data and igniting new opportunities across industries. AI systems make decisions that normally would require human intelligence, at a faster rate and with greater accuracy.

But before your agency can take advantage of all AI can offer, you must start your AI journey by building a technical infrastructure that will support its endeavors.

For government, data is at the heart of the AI journey. Given this reality, the AI journey for any agency begins with the consolidation of data for analytics and then builds from there, creating analytics-based applications to enable the intelligence, modeling, and inferencing that helps you make data-driven decisions.

While the path to AI is different for all organizations, here are some common steps to help you start and move along on your AI journey:

1. Outline your mission goals and align your agency’s AI strategy to define the use cases.
2. Determine data availability and prepare the data for AI analysis and action.
3. Understand and integrate infrastructure requirements.
4. Determine steps to build models with validation methodologies.
5. Establish tracking tools and systems.
6. Adapt and scale the strategy over time.

Additionally, based on a study of the characteristics of leading IT organizations, research firm IDC offers these recommendations for agencies that want to create a stable foundation for unlocking data capital:

• Embrace autonomous infrastructure that will eliminate tedious maintenance and management tasks and allow IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Invest in modernized infrastructure that enables your organization to capitalize on the value of your data.
• Implement software-defined networking capabilities to automate the provisioning of workloads across internal, co-location and cloud data centers.
• Standardize on a single management platform or enable integration between multiple platforms to improve collaboration and oversight among organizational silos.

Today, AI is fundamentally transforming government by enabling agencies to deliver faster, better, deeper and unforeseen insights.

These insights streamline and automate processes that drive operational efficiencies, facilitate the ability to transform decision making, and deliver the results that meet the mission.

Agencies that capitalize fully on the AI opportunity will be positioned for greater success in the era of the digitally driven enterprise.

To learn more about AI and its capabilities, access our self-paced, 10-minute course here.