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available to intelligent personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. More than two dozen agencies — including the departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Transportation — are participating.
Many vendors and other technology experts see huge opportunities for AI inside and outside government. In June, an IDC study sponsored by Salesforce predicted that AI adop- tion will ramp up quickly in the next four years. AI-powered customer relationship management activities will add $1.1 trillion to business revenue and create more than 800,000 jobs from 2017 to 2021, the study states.
In the federal government, using AI to automate tasks now performed by employees would save at least 96.7 million working hours a year, a cost savings of $3.3 billion, accord- ing to the Deloitte study. Based on the high end of Deloitte’s estimates, AI adoption could save as many as 1.2 billion work- ing hours — and $41.1 billion — every year.
“AI-based applications can reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans can’t easily do on our own, such as sifting through millions of documents in real time for the most rel- evant content,” the report states.
AI vs. the workforce
Although some might fear a robot takeover, Eggers said fed- eral workers should not worry about their jobs in the near term. Although there’s likely to be pressure from lawmakers to use AI to reduce the government’s headcount, agencies should look at AI as a way to supplement employees’ work and allow them to focus on more creative and difficult tasks, he added.
The goal is to ask: “How do we automate the menial, the dull, the repetitive tasks, so you can free up labor to do more important things?” Eggers said. “There are always going to be more things for government to do than we have resources for.”
“IF IT WAS A NINE- INNING [BASEBALL] GAME, WE’RE
Agencies should think of AI as a new digital labor force “so we can make better decisions, so we can make faster decisions, and we can serve citizens better,” he added. “Then you can look at getting a lot of value out of this, as opposed to doing it in kind of a random way.”
Castro said AI promises to change the nature of govern- ment work, and he added that employees will “be left with the good stuff. If you can take away the pain of government bureaucracy — and AI can do a lot of that — you can change the culture of government.”
Meagan Metzger, founder and CEO of government-focused IT accelerator Dcode42, said agencies that want to adopt AI for customer-facing systems must prepare their employees for the changes. “You’re not replacing staff. You just need
NOW.”
PROBABLY IN THE FIRST INNING RIGHT
WILLIAM EGGERS, DELOITTE
July 2017
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