Using Generative AI to Transform the Constituent Experience

From the delivery of healthcare and public benefits to emergency management and national security, generative AI – GenAI, for short – presents opportunities for governments to enhance constituent services. GenAI can empower front-line civil servants, improve the accessibility of public services, and enhance back-office processes.

In pursuit of these benefits, federal spending on AI increased 22 percent since 2021—and 250 percent since 2017—creating new avenues for agencies to drive their technology agenda, through funding vehicles like the Technology Modernization Fund, which has issued a call for agency proposals to accelerate AI rollout across government.

But there’s a balance to be struck: the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on AI requires agencies to promote AI innovation while mitigating complex challenges such as cybersecurity, algorithmic bias, user privacy, and content accuracy. And a governance framework establishing the guardrails to protect against unacceptable risk in a decentralized environment, such as different agencies within a department, or different offices within an agency, is essential. Agencies must navigate both rapid technological change in AI and an uncertain regulatory and trust/safety landscape.

Learning Objectives:

• Delineate the qualitative and quantitative differences between augmenting customer service and replacing human customer service representatives
• Establish metrics for measuring changes in customer satisfaction
• Identify the role that GenAI can play in strengthening system security and customer privacy
• Understand the challenge of algorithmic bias and how to mitigate it