The use of artificial intelligence tools is becoming increasingly common across Federal agencies, but what about deployment of an AI-driven “meta-human?” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said the agency has created one and is ready to launch it this year.
CBP is following the launch of its “ChatCBP” internal chat bot with what it’s calling a “meta-human” according to Edward Mays, deputy assistant commissioner of Infrastructure and support services and chief enterprise infrastructure officer at CBP, who shared the news at the GovCIO Federal IT Efficiency Summit on Thursday.
That meta-human will be “like an avatar with an AI base,” Mays explained, calling the development “game changing.”
The avatar would enable customers coming to an agency to interact with the avatar which will be able to understand and respond to customers while it finds “the information that you need and potentially packages it for you,” he said.
“It’s all about helping the person, right, that human that has to lead and accomplish a mission and or task … So that’s how we’re using AI,” said Mays.
Other ways that the agency will integrate AI include through ticketing tools and its help desk and enterprise operations center where the tools will help identify and solve issues within the larger ecosystem. By doing so, the tools will replace what Mays called “corporate knowledge” or memory of past incidents.
“We’ve got a huge knowledge base … things go bump in the night and they break, so how do you solve that problem quickly?” said Mays. “Well, a lot of times it’s … remember, this happened in December blah, blah, blah, go fix that thing … we’ve got to do a lot better than that.”
Now, AI can help officials scan across a database or operating system and look “across all those signaling tools that are kind of like trip wires,” and say “this is where you need to look,” Mays said.
As CBP continues to harness AI to streamline operations and improve security, the agency is also looking toward future cybersecurity threats posed by quantum technologies. Mays said CBP will soon secure a high value asset (HVA) with post-quantum cryptography.
“NIST [National Institute for Standards and Technology] started talking about post-quantum cryptography a few years back, we were one of the first agencies that did tests and ran the algorithms, and we’re planning to actually secure one of our HVAs hopefully this year,” said Mays.
“We’ve already done a couple of smaller apps as pilots … but this is an exciting time, and I think that it’s great to be in a leadership position at this point in time,” Mays added.