The head of the State Department’s IT and cybersecurity efforts said today that it is her top priority to “improve user experience while making cybersecurity more robust.”
The department’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Kelly Fletcher said to accomplish this goal, her team is actively working in “three big categories”: artificial intelligence, governance, and network.
During the Palo Alto Networks Public Sector Ignite event in Tysons, Va., Fletcher said employees at the State Department are “hungry” for generative AI.
The CIO said there are a lot of “niche capabilities we could provide with AI – we could provide really exquisite AI to solve specific problems,” but the biggest request her team gets from State Department employees is a chatbot.
“They want to load 30 pages in Russian into a chatbot, and then they want it summarized in English. That’s what they want,” Fletcher provided as one example. “What we’re doing today is we’re rolling out a chatbot, and we’re going to let people experiment. We’re going to see what they use it for, and then we’re going to move to building things that are more custom fit for State.”
“I’m excited about this. I think it has a real obvious improvement to user experience – I think it’s going to increase productivity dramatically,” she said. As for cybersecurity, Fletcher said enabling a chatbot specific to the State Department is more secure.
“If they want to use gen AI tools, I need them to have tools on their network that they can use today,” she said. “This is going to make us more secure, frankly, because even if we have people 100 percent trying to do the right thing, what I don’t want is State Department data leaving the State Department environment.”
Also on the AI and analytics side, Fletcher said other examples of technology her team is deploying are dashboards. While she referred to this tool as “not cool technology,” she noted that even the basics enable the State Department to “do our core mission better.”
“I deeply want folks to use the tools that already exist to do their job better,” Fletcher said. “I have one example that I think is really powerful and that is dashboards in Kenya. So, I’m really pushing my team to enable … a dashboard and we have all the tools already to do this.”
The CIO said that she ensures everyone at the State Department is up to the right standards through governance, oversight, and policy. One example Fletcher provided is that her team is putting together a master user record for a more secure and seamless employee experience.
Finally, on the network front, Fletcher said the State Department is focusing on satellite communications (satcom).
“I think satcom is going to change the world, and I’m really excited for what it’s going to do for the Department of State,” Fletcher said. “In some of these locations, I have very expensive, low bandwidth internet. I would love in West Africa and Pacific islands to have resilient, redundant, robust internet that we can use.”
The CIO said satcom will be critical for continued communication with embassies during emergencies, or simply to be able to communicate with American citizens who are traveling abroad to areas with no internet – something Fletcher described as “life changing.”
“This is a place where I just think there’s going to be a ton of changes in the next couple of years,” she said. “My goal is to … take advantage of the newest technologies to help American citizens and keep our humans in our embassies safe.”
