Alex Measure, senior economist at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)–who has developed and deployed an artificial intelligence application to help the agency analyze workforce health data–said on Tuesday that convincing agency leaders to pursue AI applications can be the toughest part of the development and deployment journey.
Speaking at an event organized by NVIDIA, Dell EMC, and Government Acquisitions, Measure said that pushing through the use-case for AI “is by far the hardest part” of getting a project off the ground.
“The biggest task is a communications task,” he said, adding “I have support of senior management, which is critical.”
Speaking more generally about his AI development experience at BLS, Measure said it was important to have as much AI “training data” as possible, and said organizations that perform repetitive tasks should collect as much data as they can. Some of those organizations, he said, are “generating a lot of data, but not saving it…The more training data you have, the better,” he added.
Separately, Steve Harris, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC Federal, said that the government “in many ways is ahead of the commercial market space” in delivering AI-based services, with the exception of the financial services industry. “Our Number One issue now is helping government to get going,” he added.
