While private sector organizations are racing to implement use cases for artificial intelligence, federal agencies are carefully weighing the opportunities they can leverage to take advantage of the emerging technology.
The federal government is a bit more hamstrung when it comes to AI. Limited budgets and underskilled staffs are challenges that private organizations must contend with, but not at quite the same level as federal agencies do.
Neil Graver, field CTO at CDW Government, says, “It’s exciting to develop new solutions and then move on to the next challenge. However, the real difficulty comes when you're left with a collection of disconnected, short-term fixes without a broader strategy for technical and seamless integration. Short term problem solving without a strategy often leads to the accumulation of technical debt, which ultimately hinders an organization’s progress and stifles innovation.”
Technical debt is just one of several common hurdles federal agencies face in adopting emerging technologies such as AI. Yemi Ogunsanya, sales manager for the Army at CDW Government, notes the difficulty federal agencies encounter due to a lack of continuity on their IT teams. “I don’t want to call it turnover,” Ogunsanya says. “But people move around so often that continuity is a challenge.”
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How the Federal Government Is Methodically Approaching AI
In addition to legacy tech, staffing and budgeting issues, federal agencies must maneuver the arduous regulatory processes that tend to slow down decision-making.
Ogunsanya says the federal government isn’t quite ready for implementing AI. “AI and AI adoption are part of government conversations, but we’re still trying to understand how exactly it plays into the current landscape,” Ogunsanya says. “AI has the potential to be a significant differentiator in the future, and we need to embrace it as our guiding North Star.”
By improving current systems and processes through upskilling, transformation and automation today, agencies can mature in a way that positions them for AI success going forward, Ogunsanya continues: “The challenge of dated, disjointed systems and complex processes remains, but focusing on AI-driven innovation will enable us to overcome these hurdles and drive future advancements if we continue to modernize.”
Last year, the federal government took one of its first official steps toward adopting AI use cases when the White House issued its executive order on AI. In the executive order, President Joe Biden acknowledges that “AI holds extraordinary potential for both promise and peril.”
“Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks” by laying out policies and principles for the use of AI by federal agencies, the executive order notes. “This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.”
Agencies have made significant progress toward implementing those mandated policies. According to a report published Sept. 9 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal agencies have taken actions to implement selected artificial intelligence management and talent requirements that were due by the end of March ‘24. Specifically, all 13 of the selected AI management and talent requirements contained in the relevant Executive Order were fully implemented.”
And there’s still much progress to be made, notes CDW Field Marketing Manager Cathy Sionkowski: “The whole goal of IT modernization is to achieve automation. There’s an initiative poised to solve that issue so that IT is more efficient in the future. But AI is a different kind of journey.”
“Data pools may contain state secrets, expose security risks or share information with unknown context. You need a very high level of data integrity to go beyond doing basic AI,” she says.
Graver agrees. “It’s tough to have advanced AI conversations with customers that are still trying to implement the basics. You need to be realistic about your current maturity level and continuously transform or advance your technology. It’s about trying to help them understand the desired outcome and slowly start to develop an automated infrastructure in order to leverage AI down the road.”
Moving Beyond the Challenges to Realize the Promise of AI
Graver still believes that AI offers great potential for federal agencies. “I would argue that automation has to be the key for digital transformation,” he says. “And when you have that true codification of most systems and completely automated, immutable systems with data integrity, you can then start to leverage AI to understand problems you may not even be able to comprehend yet.”
Sionkowski points out that not all AI use cases should be viewed in the same way. “We have the misconception that all AI is the same, and that automation is the same. But all AI is not the same,” she says. “In some cases, AI is a matter of building a script that automates a process through the ability to interact. In other cases, it’s accessing information or a reservoir of directions to help to build a tree to do it.” And in still other cases, Sionkowski notes, AI depends on consistent and clean data sources to perform tasks, such as looking up account numbers or recognizing the phone number of an incoming call. “What level of AI can you implement, and what are you ready for?” she asks.
READ MORE: Agencies need to consider these security risks when adopting artificial intelligence.
How a Third-Party Expert Can Bridge Gaps in Adopting AI
Fortunately, federal agencies don’t need to make their AI journeys alone. Experts such as CDW can offer solutions and services to help identify achievable opportunities and realize the promise AI has to offer.
A third party can offer guidance and assistance. CDW and its stable of partners know how to work within the constraints of federal policies and regulatory compliance to improve the performance and accuracy of AI models.
IT leaders such as Cisco and NetApp have multiple offerings to help federal agencies deploy AI without compromising security or hampering existing infrastructure that still adds value. With the power of global leaders in their corner, federal agencies will soon be narrowing the AI gap between themselves and their private sector counterparts.
