While Federal agencies are busy experimenting with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, government AI experts on Thursday said that it’s important to make sure employees know how to use the shiny new tools and capabilities – and feel confident doing so.
At the Federal IT Efficiency Summit hosted by GovCIO on July 10, two officials explained that they had to implement training to get their workforce comfortable with using GenAI tools.
Andrea Brandon, the deputy assistant secretary for budget, finance, grants, and acquisition at the Department of the Interior (DoI), said that her agency recently installed “DoI ChatGPT” at no charge to their employees.
“However, I will tell you that once it was installed, not everybody understood how to use it,” Brandon said. “Right away, I started getting emails from staff from all across the department, all the different bureaus, telling me, ‘What is this? There’s no instructions for how to use it. It’s just a big black screen.’”
“So, one would think, since ChatGPT has been out for a while, that they would have kind of already known how to use it. But that actually was not the case,” she explained. “I guess everyone’s too busy doing their actual job to play around with it after work.”
Nevertheless, Brandon said the agency put together a prompt script that included different prompts for the different lines of business within DoI – including prompts for the finance line of business, budget, grants, property management, etc.
The prompts helped teach employees how to use ChatGPT “to help accelerate and streamline and produce efficiencies within your job,” Brandon said.
“That was one of the ways that we actually were able to execute the newest form of AI that’s more readily available – actually, not just in government, but across the world – and to get people accustomed to using it and ensuring that they didn’t have fear of using artificial intelligence,” she said.
Over at NASA, the agency encountered a similar experience. David Salvagnini, the chief data officer (CDO) and chief AI officer (CAIO) at NASA, said that his agency is approaching GenAI by ensuring the workforce is first “comfortable with the tools and the capabilities.”
Salvagnini explained that NASA has not necessarily pursued AI use cases, but instead has taken more of a “grassroots” approach.
Through this approach, Salvagnini said the goal is to “expose people [to] the tools, get them comfortable with them, get them learning how to prompt, get them starting to understand how the tools can help them on their day to day, and then letting the use cases emerge from that awareness.”
“That’s been rather successful,” he said. “We kicked all that off when I was first appointed as CAIO last summer with something called the ‘Summer of AI’ campaign, which was really a three-month surge of training and learning activities across the agency.”
Through the Summer of AI campaign, NASA had roughly 4,000 participants in 40 different events over 90 days, as well as a 300 percent increase in employees taking their first AI training.
“We directly touched about one-third of the entire NASA workforce through that, and it was quite, quite successful,” Salvagnini said.
“From an efficiency perspective, we’re putting the tools in the hands of the workforce, we’re letting them be comfortable with [the tools], and then starting to find ways in which those tools can be more capable,” he said.