AI Serves as a Force Multiplier in Fed Use Cases

Artificial intelligence can scan data quickly, helping federal agencies with a range of tasks.

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

Artificial intelligence is making a difference for beleaguered government cybersecurity directors who are facing challenges in hiring qualified personnel and sorting through a high volume of alerts and logs.

AI solutions can detect anomalies in cyberspace and track them. It also can flag associated accounts and block them before a human analyst has a chance to respond, says Peter Dunn, federal CTO for CDW Government.

Foreign adversaries, in particular, “will continue to target the U.S. government” with state-sponsored cyber espionage, according to Google Cloud’s Cybersecurity Forecast 2025. With bad actors seeking every cyber advantage, agencies can improve their security operations centers with AI solutions.

AI can sort data from myriad sources and assemble a clear picture of the threat landscape. In a survey for the new CDW Artificial Intelligence Research Report, 85% of IT leaders and decision-makers across industries said that AI can improve cybersecurity, and 55% percent said their organization is currently using AI to improve cybersecurity.

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All industries have tapped outside expertise to assist with these endeavors. Among survey respondents who said they have hired a third party to help with AI, 46% said they solicited that assistance for security.

Reducing Repetitive Tasks With AI

The CDW Artificial Intelligence Research Report spotlights other AI use cases, including support for customer service. Agencies are digging into how they can use AI tools to improve citizen services. The National Archives and Records Administration has turned to intelligent document processing to digitize large volumes of documents and make them publicly available for search. The Veterans Administration streamlined processing of veterans claims by training an AI model to quickly sort through documentation.

In both cases, agencies harnessed the power of AI to conduct repetitive tasks quickly, extracting data that it was trained to identify. In a similar fashion, AI can scan databases and logs faster than humans, which allows it to sort quickly through a high volume of cyberthreat information to identify significant attacks and escalate alerts for quicker responses.

AI solutions also can spot patterns and profile threats rapidly, delivering speedy insights that can support quick, intelligent decision-making. And that can make a real difference.

UP NEXT: Agile development is making agencies more successful.

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