The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State Department are preparing the workforce for artificial intelligence (AI) before scaling the technology as agencies align behind the White House’s AI Action Plan, top officials said Friday.
Officials from the State Department and EPA said they are reskilling their workforce by integrating AI education into mandated training, implanting AI ambassadors, and creating communities of practice.
For example, Niki Maslin, EPA’s chief AI officer and chief technology officer, said her office brought empathy to open conversations about where AI could support agency missions before bringing in the technology.
“After some of those relationships were built … we were then able to talk to them about what AI can bring, and they’ve been really receptive so far in that approach, and building the tools that are just native into what it is that they do,” Maslin said while speaking at a GovCIO Media and Research event in Tysons, Va.
In addition, Maslin said the EPA is building a community of practice to bridge gaps between technologists and agency programs, and it is deploying AI ambassadors at every level of the agency.
“We can’t be everywhere all at once, but we want to make sure that that people have points of contact they can reach out to, as well as folks who kind of understand the CIO [chief information officer] side,” Maslin explained.
Amy Ritualo, the State Department’s chief data and AI officer, said the department is baking AI into its workforce by making it part of required training, such as inserting AI modules into the National Foreign Affairs Training Center curriculum.
The department is also supporting AI training through AI “office hours.”
“People don’t want to hear from my team … they want to hear from the [economy] officer in Nigeria that’s using AI,” Ritualo said. “What we’ve done is created opportunities for that space to exist.”
The department is also driving peer-to-peer AI adoption via AI.state.gov, a centralized library of role-based use cases and short videos from colleagues. And it’s speeding up access to short-term technical expertise through the General Services Administration’s IT job families pipeline while eyeing new Office of Personnel Management tech staffing programs.
Collaboration across agencies is also helping drive reskilling and training efforts, Ritualo said, pointing to Maslin’s EPA AI ambassador program as a model that is working well and could be adopted more broadly across government.
“I’ve been in the government for over 20 years, and I think I have never seen more coordination and collaboration across the U.S. government on any other issue than AI … because we’re all going through the same thing,” Ritualo said.