Page 34 - FCW, July 2017

Emerging Tech
“YOU TRAIN
“There are, for a lack of a better number, a gazillion sweet spots” for AI in government, said Daniel Enthoven, business development manager at Domino Data Lab, a vendor of AI and data science collaboration tools.
WATSON
ONCE, AND IT
Still, many agencies will need to answer some difficult questions before they embrace AI, machine learning and autonomous systems. For instance, how will the agencies audit decisions made by intelligent systems? How will they gather data from often disparate sources to fuel intelligent decisions? And how will agencies manage their employees when AI systems take over tasks previously performed by humans?
UNDERSTANDS
EVERYTHING.
YOU’RE
GETTING
A more intelligent census
ANSWER, TIME
A VERY
Intelligence agencies are using Watson to comb through piles of data and provide predictive analysis, and the Census Bureau is considering using the supercomputer-powered AI as a first-line call center that would answer people’s ques- tions about the 2020 census, Gordy said.
CONSISTENT
A Census Bureau spokesperson added that the AI virtual assistant could improve response times and enhance caller interactions.
AFTER
Using AI should save the bureau money because “you have a computer doing this instead of people,” Gordy said. And if trained correctly, the system will provide more accurate answers than a group of call-center workers could.
TIME AFTER
TIME.”
“You train Watson once, and it understands everything,” he said. “You’re getting a very consistent answer, time after time after time.”
For many agencies, however, it’s still early in the AI adop- tion cycle. Use of the technology is “very, very nascent in government,” said William Eggers, executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights and co-author of a recent study on AI in government. “If it was a nine-inning [baseball] game, we’re probably in the first inning right now.”
He added that over the next couple of years, agencies can expect to see AI-like functionality being incorporated into the software products marketed to them.
Chatbots and telephone agents
The first step for many civilian agencies appears to be using AI as a chatbot or telephone agent. Daniel Castro, vice presi- dent of the Information Technology and Innovation Founda- tion, said intelligent agents should be able to answer about 90 percent of the questions agencies receive, and the people asking those questions aren’t likely to miss having a human response.
“It’s not like people are expecting to know their IRS agents when they call them up with a question,” he said.
The General Services Administration’s Emerging Citizen Technology program launched an open-source pilot proj- ect in April to help federal agencies make their information
SAM GORDY, IBM
16 July 2017
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