The new report highlights the urgent need for federal leaders to help executives better understand and embrace the rapid rise of AI in order to address the challenges and opportunities it will bring to their organizations.
A new report, ” Driving Agency Innovation in the AI Era ,” argues that federal officials need to make broader efforts to educate their leadership teams and support work environments that encourage leaders to identify appropriate AI use cases and lay the foundation for moving from possibility to practice.
The report, produced by Scoop News Group and funded by Microsoft, highlights the work of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, an organization that has been working behind the scenes at government agencies to develop senior executives who have a deeper understanding of what AI can and cannot do, and how to use it in practice at their agencies.
The Partnership's AI Federal Leadership Program brings together qualified senior executives for a six-month course that explores the capabilities of AI and its potential impact on their agencies, culminating in executives developing a roadmap for AI projects at their agencies. Since its inception, more than 500 senior executives from 40 federal agencies and more than 30 states have completed the program.
“Not only does the program serve as a model for educating government leaders about AI and its impacts, it is creating a much-needed pool of senior government executives who are better equipped to lead their agencies through AI transformation,” the report said.
The report highlights several key elements agency leaders should embrace to prepare for the expected impact of AI on their workforce, operations and missions.
Share lessons learned: A key aspect of the program is the opportunity for participants to share their AI aspirations and application lessons with their peers. Former program coach Nancy Potok said, “The interaction between people with different levels of technical expertise and experience, and coming from very different organizational cultures, is one of the strengths of the course, as we can all learn from each other.”
Access to AI experts: The program connects participants with technology experts at the forefront of AI development. A cabinet-level agency chief technology officer emphasized the value of this access, saying, “The federal government's challenges are probably [only] “There are only about 50,000 people in the world who can talk to you about AI and understand what you're talking about,” he says. That makes it difficult for senior executives to understand directly how AI works at a corporate level and how to strategically plan its use.
Focus on problems, not just solutions: Patricia Cogswell, a former Department of Homeland Security official and program facilitator, emphasizes the importance of defining the problem before choosing an AI use case. She cautions against simply “picking the solution and then finding the problem,” emphasizing the need to identify mission-critical challenges that AI can help solve.
The report also includes 12 lessons that participants collectively said they learned from their experience in the program and the pilot projects they subsequently developed at their institutions.
Additionally, the book shares examples of how federal agency leaders, including Eric Stein, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Information Services at the U.S. Department of State, are applying lessons learned from the AI Leadership Program in their own agencies.
For the federal government to get serious about AI adoption, agencies and the government need to take a more systematic approach to training federal employees at all levels, one Cabinet-level chief technology officer wrote in the report. He recommended AI orientation and training programs that focus on the following needs:
- Executive Help them understand the language of AI and what it can do.
- Middle management They are the people who will be using the vendor's services, so they must be able to tell the vendor what they need and what they should buy.
- Acquisition Specialist You need to know how to write a contract.
- user – Help people understand how to use AI correctly (and avoid uploading their data to public engines).
- Security Expert No one understands how AI can be misused.
Another federal AI leader quoted in the report emphasized the importance of experimentation: “Being able to see something that might not be the final product, but is half done and can then be iterated on is really important for building momentum and showing people what the art of the possible is,” he said.
To learn more about “Leading Agency Innovation in the AI Era,” download the full report.
This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and funded by Microsoft.
