Artificial intelligence tech is rapidly reshaping the Federal workforce, powering tools that assist doctors in offering early cancer diagnoses and helping procurement officers review complex contracts.
During GovCIO’s AI FedLab event in Reston, Va., on Tuesday, AI leaders discussed different use cases where they see AI driving innovation across the Federal government.
Susan Gregurick, the director of the Office of Data Science Strategy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), shared a new use case that came out of a partnership between NIH and the Department of Energy (DoE).
Gregurick said DoE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently published work on AI extraction of electronic pathology (ePath) reports – a key way for cancer data specialists to find reportable cancers.
“If you’re doing a diagnosis of cancer, it’s the ePath reports that are the key finding that give you that early diagnosis,” Gregurick explained. “Well, your ePath reports are not connected to your EHR [electronic health record] system, so being able to pull those out and link those to your EHR system and send them off to the cancer surveillance programs is really key for that very early diagnosis of cancer.”
“I’m really pleased and proud that we’re able to partner with the Department of Energy on this and also on the National AI Research Resource,” she said.
Jonathan Alboum, the Federal CTO at ServiceNow, shared another use case that is helping an unnamed agency within the Department of Defense (DoD) to review contracts.
“They’re piloting ServiceNow AI agents, autonomous agents, to run contract reviews and as part of their core vendor management. So, it’s not just getting the contract awarded … [it’s] contract closeouts and these things that, you know, nobody ever really focuses on. These are great tasks for agents and automation in general,” Alboum said.
“DoD is leading, I think, in a lot of ways,” he added. “There’s an agency piloting these agents today [to] make up for staff staffing shortages that they have now and will likely grow over time.”
Additionally, Alboum said these AI agents have the ability to analyze software licenses, see who is not using them, and reclaim licenses – instead of having to buy more software licenses. He noted that this “has broad applicability in the Federal government.”
“We talked a lot about licensing in the first few months of this administration. We always have … but we’ve never really fully automated these things,” Alboum said.
“We’ve been much more effective at trying to manage licensing requirements and the cost associated with licensing by using agents to do the work that people may not have had time to do before, or didn’t want to do, or didn’t consider high priority,” he added. “You can save a lot of money, and those cost savings are clearly critical in this administration. They should always have been, but there really is a focus there. This is a great way to meet some of those needs.”