The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) launched FWD Chat on Oct. 7, adding an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to its Federal Workforce Data (FWD) website that lets users ask questions about the federal civilian workforce in plain English and receive answers based on OPM data.
The beta tool, available through OPM’s Federal Workforce Data site, can answer questions about federal employment, hiring, departures, and workforce trends without requiring users to write code or build their own data queries. OPM’s site currently includes workforce data through August 2026.
An OPM spokesperson told MeriTalk that FWD Chat uses ChatGPT Luna as the large language model (LLM) on the back end.
“Public isn’t the same as accessible. FWD has published monthly data on roughly 2 million federal civilian employees since January, but answering a specific question with it has usually meant writing code or waiting on someone who could,” OPM Chief Information Officer Adam Starr told MeriTalk.
“FWD Chat lets anyone ask about the federal workforce in plain English and get an answer from OPM’s public data, with the query behind it so they can check the work,” Starr said.
When a user submits a question, the LLM interprets it and translates it into a structured query that selects the appropriate dataset, measure, filters, and time period. The statistics themselves come from OPM’s Federal Workforce Data rather than the LLM.
OPM said the underlying data comes from the agency’s Enterprise Human Resources Integration Status and Dynamics datasets, which cover federal employment, accessions, and separations.
FWD Chat also provides users with the query behind each response and links back to OPM’s Table Builder so they can independently review the source data. On its FWD website, OPM notes that “results may vary even when similar questions are asked.”
The new chatbot builds on OPM’s January launch of the Federal Workforce Data website, which replaced the agency’s FedScope platform. The site provides workforce data, interactive visualizations, and downloadable datasets on federal workforce trends.