IT Leaders See State Governments Making Inroads on AI Adoption

Skepticism around AI still very much exists in some pockets of the public sector workforce.

Consider a 2024 study that PSHRA^® conducted with researchers from Nova Southeastern University and the University of Illinois. In a poll of 155 PSHRA^® members, 58% of respondents reported feeling that their employees are afraid they will be replaced by AI. And, when asked to gauge their comfort level experimenting with AI, 44% noted they were either “not comfortable” or “very uncomfortable.”

At StateScoop’s recent IT Modernization Summit, Shawnzia Thomas, chief information officer for the state of Georgia, told attendees that her agency’s focus is on getting employees excited about using AI, “instead of worrying the technology might replace them,” wrote StateScoop’s Sophia Fox-Sowell.

“Our takeaway here in Georgia is getting our folks [within Georgia’s eight state agencies testing generative AI tools] comfortable with it, boosting that morale, making sure they understand it’s not going to their take their job, for one,” Thomas told attendees. “The second type of way is training. We’ve got to do some extensive training that will get that adoption rate up.”

Georgia exemplifies the “dozens of state governments” that have recently “built inroads to responsibly incorporating artificial intelligence into their operations and digital services, including creating task forces, developing policies and piloting use cases,” wrote Fox-Sowell.

At StateScoop’s online IT summit, held on Nov. 19, Thomas and other state government leaders shared how their agencies are incorporating AI into their operations, and how they’re training employees on AI’s use.

State government agencies face the same AI adoption issues that other organizations grapple with, such as establishing ethical guidelines and training employees on new AI capabilities and tools, Fox-Sowell continued.

At the summit, government IT officials shared some of the ways they’re familiarizing workers with the technology.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for instance, is using Open AI’s ChatGPT for a one-year pilot in its HR and IT departments, to get a sense of whether the tool can enhance repetitive, mundane tasks.

“Over the course of the first six months, we did surveys, interviews, group studies,” Amaya Capellan, chief information officer for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, said at the summit, noting that the state plans to expand the pilot program into more state agencies.

“One of the big takeaways was time saving,” she said. “People reported saving about 105 minutes a day, which is pretty significant.”

Nisanth Shah, senior advisor for responsible AI in the state of Maryland, stressed the importance of providing employees with this type of training.

“Humans need to thrive in establishing a capability from scratch, guiding it toward escape velocity, setting the conditions for success, as much as actually building and deploying,” Shah said at the summit. “And those are often sort of different skill sets than, you know, someone who is then taking a set of things that have been created and being able to scale that effectively across an institution.”