Artificial intelligence in the news — some doom and gloom and healthy skepticism, but also a lot of optimism and success stories.With all these swirling conversations, it can be hard to figure out what you — as a government employee — need to know. What does AI mean for your agency and why should you care?
To get answers to these and other questions,
We sat down with Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President Angela Zutavern a pioneer in machine intelligence and data science strategies. Her work has helped numerous companies and government agencies, including the Census Bureau and Federal Aviation Administration make better decisions through human and machine partnerships. Zutavern is also the co-author of “The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible.”Our conversation ranged from the basics to more in-depth questions about procuring AI and the future of government jobs.
GovLoop: What is artificial intelligence?
Zutavern: It’s the ability for computers and algorithms to learn on their own to perceive things around them and to act using data. Artificial overseas chinese in worldwide data intelligence has been around for 50 years. Artificial intelligence, along with high performance computing, make up the broader machine intelligence.
GovLoop: What does AI look like in government? How is it being used?
Zutavern: Right now, artificial intelligence is being this blog post is an excerpt from used for narrow applications — narrow machine intelligence. And the reason is because the technology right now is really good at specific or well-defined tasks.Something that government folks are hearing a lot of is robotic process automation (RPA). That’s where software bots can perform simple activities for people. That could be [tasks] like automatically sorting through inquiries or email or automating help desk or call center type operations.
We also see agencies taking on tougher problems.
Things that we couldn’t solve in the past because we didn’t tg data have enough data [or] computing power, or the technology just wasn’t there. And then the third area is mission improvement. And that goes beyond just cost savings or efficiencies. That is really taking the mission to the next level by using artificial intelligence to sort through and make meaning of tons and tons of data.