The numbers are in – artificial intelligence (AI) has saved the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) 11,000 hours per week across the agency, and 80% of employees use the technology weekly, CMS Chief Information Officer (CIO) Patrick Newbold said Wednesday.
Speaking at the ACT-IAC Public Health Summit in Reston, Va., Newbold said the CMS AI push has saved time and grown a large inventory of AI use cases.
“Every decision we make, every system we build, and every policy we implement, touches real people,” Newbold said. “That’s not a responsibility at CMS we take lightly, and it’s why, as we move into this new era of artificial intelligence, we’re doing so with intention, with care, and with a clear set of principles.”
Newbold said that 80% of 6,900 CMS employees and contractors surveyed reported that they use AI tools every week. He also said the agency now sports 100 ready-to-use AI assistants and supports 14,000 AI use cases.
That number stems from a secure enterprise-wide AI infrastructure that CMS built “pretty much from the ground up,” Newbold said. He explained that CMS is hiring AI talent and building strong governance so that AI is deployed safely and transparently as a human-led tool.
“We’re providing prompt engineering and applied AI training across CMS to build enterprise-wide AI fluency,” Newbold said, adding that “the adoption has been pretty remarkable.”
He said that 80-85% of the CMS workforce reported that AI tools are easy to use. Specifically, to describe the tools’ usefulness, Newbold said employees have called the tools “my lifesaver, God, my favorite, [and] my hero,” adding, “that means something is working.”
“More importantly, in our data, we are saving about five and a half hours per person per week,” Newbold added.
“Think about what this means – that’s time that can be spent on work that requires judgment, creativity, human connection. That’s time they’re not spending on repetitive tasks that a machine can do just as good or even better. So, all the hard stuff our workforce can focus on, delivering outcomes for CMS,” he said.
Looking ahead, the CIO said that the agency’s “CMS Chat” tool is moving beyond a basic chatbot into an agent-based system that can carry out specialized workflows, already tied into internal platforms such as Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
In the coming months, Newbold said the agency plans to connect it to external data sources such as census data and data.cms.gov, while keeping a CMS employee responsible for final decisions.
“Technologies like AI, interoperability, and data connectivity are no longer emerging. They’re here, and they’re reshaping how care is delivered and managed,” Newbold said.