The American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) has proposed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Playbook for the Federal government on the heels of the AI/Machine Learning Primer from 2019.
The playbook will help agencies reduce waste of time, money, and resources, cut down on errors, and enable collaboration across agency divisions and other Federal agencies.
“I think – from a CIO standpoint – it gives you a roadmap to be able to implement a much smaller prototype to see success or a much bigger project to see success,” one of the playbook’s authors and Abeyon CEO Mallesh Murugesan said.
The playbook contains a series of phases that contain “key activities organized in functional areas” that go beyond technical aspects of AI to include management, people, process, and acquisition areas. Each initial phase will feed into the subsequent phase and provide a roadmap to implement AI at any scale. The five phases included in the AI Playbook include:
- Problem Assessment: Developing a vision and business objectives to see if AI solutions can address specific use cases while delivering results that optimize services and operational delivery.
- Organizational Readiness: “Engage AI subject matter experts and consider nuances that accompany an AI solution” through creating a project management office and establishing an AI-tailored business, functional and technical requirements, and implementation plans.
- Solution Selection: Investigate the business consideration, AI requirements, deployment models, and procurement options that will establish an optimal provider selection.
- AI Implementation: Customize and configure AI solution to meet operational objectives.
- AI Integration: Integrate AI solution into the agency infrastructure.
Vice President of Prometheus Computing Frederic de Vaulx said that the playbook developers asked themselves several questions that they wanted the playbook to answer to help an agency determine whether to move from one phase to another on a given use case.
“When we developed the playbook, we really tried to make sure that it’s not just about the adoption of the technology and trying to figure out what the technology is, but also how does it impact or is influenced by the rest of the organization?” de Vaulx offered. “How is an agency going to integrate it within the rest of the organization? How is the workforce effected or will affect the technology?”
The AI playbook isn’t just meant to encourage collaboration across Federal agencies, but within agencies as well to pursue the best process for integrating AI into the organization.
“The CIOs, project managers and acquisition specialists are some of the groups that need to be a part of this journey in order for you to be successful,” de Vaulx said.
