Tech officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts said on Feb. 13 that AI integration throughout the Federal workforce should start with a focus on automating any processes involving words, images, numbers, and sounds – or a “WINS” – approach.
Landon Shaw, senior enterprise architect in the Enterprise Operations Center in the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said at ATARC’s Public Sector AI Summit that agencies should consider the WINS model to integrate AI for customer service, marketing, sales, research and development, and coding.
That approach, he said, beats “just saying that we’re going to replace some business process with a program that is just going to rinse and repeat,” and will “actually get the workforce to use AI and look at it as a companion.”
Howard Spira, chief information officer (CIO) at the Export-Import Bank of the United States, agreed with Shaw and said AI’s impact on everyday life shows that it will affect the workforce as well. He said AI technology is transforming productivity, quality, and complexity in the workplace.
“I would say ignore it at your professional peril,” Spira said. “It is transforming the notion of what productive looks like,” he added.
Frank Indiviglio, CIO at NOAA, said the most important aspect of integrating AI into his organization is building trust and communication with employees about AI’s anticipated impacts. He said NOAA implemented a generative AI work group to address areas where AI can be used and educate employees on its uses.
“Their goal is to go out there and drive things in a safe way and really come up with guidelines and build that corporate knowledge so that group can pass on knowledge to everybody else,” Indiviglio said.
Shaw also mentioned that he would like to see AI help the court system manage the large amounts of documentation that it deals with regularly. He said AI could end up replacing programs like LexisNexis because of its efficiency.
“Our focus is trying to leverage AI to automate legal processes and help clerks in their day-to-day work,” Shaw said. “[We are] trying to take tremendous amounts of data over a very long period of time and be able to make sense of that data fast,” he added.
