While the General Services Administration (GSA) has been using AI technology for quite some time, a top official on Tuesday said the agency is still in the “nascent stages” of using generative AI (GenAI) and identifying use cases.
Erika Dinnie, GSA’s associate chief information officer (CIO) for digital infrastructure technologies, said that GSA is currently in the research and experimentation phase of using GenAI.
“We’re certainly experimenting with this,” Dinnie said during a July 16 event hosted by ACT-IAC. “I would say that we are maybe in the nascent stages of doing this.”
“We here at the agency have put together our own internal policy,” she said. “We’ve [also] identified a chief AI officer who started to coordinate all of these assets within our organization. So, just making sure that we are doing this consciously, we have a plan to approach it within our organization, we have a process and metrics, and we have a way to monitor what we’re doing.”
Dinnie said that it’s not just the IT department that is experimenting with AI, noting that some areas of the agency “are more advanced than others.”
“I would say we have more sophistication around [GenAI], and we have more parameters within our organization,” she said. “At the end of the day, we’re here to increase business value. So, we will be looking at this technology to enhance the services that we can offer to our customers.”
Sid Sripada, the director of GSA’s infrastructure solutions division, added that the agency is also looking at internal AI usage on mobile devices.
“We are working very closely with our chief AI officer in analyzing and assessing what kind of controls we need on top of this,” Sripada said, explaining that his division oversees mobile device management across the entire GSA enterprise.
“That’s another entry point that, you know, there are some areas of technology that you don’t choose to be in it, but you’re already in it. So, we’re now grappling with that as well,” Sripada said.
