Artificial intelligence technologies offer a range of benefits to federal agencies, but an official from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on Tuesday warned that agencies should not view AI as “the silver bullet that fixes everything.”
Barbara Morton, the deputy chief veterans experience officer at the VA, explained that AI can be “incredibly helpful” in helping agencies be as efficient and effective as possible. However, she also cautioned agencies not to become too enamored with the new technology and lose sight of their mission.
“One of my dear colleagues here at VA said a couple weeks ago, ‘You can’t automate empathy.’ And I think that is such a profound statement in the sense of we are serving people,” Morton said during an Aug. 19 event hosted by Federal News Network. “If we can make things more efficient and easy through AI and automation and all these technological enhancements, I think that’s wonderful.”
“However, we are serving people, and people have interactive needs. They have human needs that a machine might not be able to answer. So, I would caution all of us to not lose sight of the person that we are serving,” she added.
Morton explained that the starting point should always be human-centered design – the concept of actually going out and talking to the people you’re serving before you devote resources to developing a product, service, or system.
She stressed the importance of “understanding how they want service delivery in a way that matters most to them and creates great impact for them.” Additionally, she said agencies should allow themselves to be measured by their customers’ ratings, rather than traditional operational metrics of performance.
“What is their adjudication of how we are doing? Because they should be the judges of how their government is functioning for them,” Morton said.
The official also noted that the VA has “been able to earn a good report card from veterans and users” for their VA: Health & Benefits mobile app, which has a 4.8 rating on the Apple Store. That rating is rivaling industry leaders such as USAA and Uber.
The app reflects the redesigned VA.gov website, which the agency launched in 2018 to serve as a digital front door for veterans. The VA: Health & Benefits mobile app offers a different view of that system for tech-savvy veterans who want to access these features in a quick and easy way.
“We’re able to earn that score not because we’re special; it’s because we’re designing with those that utilize our services to respond to what they want and deliver it,” Morton said.
“So, to me, [there’s] really always room for improvement. We’re always striving to do the best that we possibly can. But I think that’s a really concrete use case to prove the concept of how powerful the framework and usage of human-centered design and incorporating our customers into our build and solutions, how powerful that is to produce great results for those that we serve,” she said.