Unlock your data possibilities for the GenAI era

The productivity value of Generative Artificial Intelligence, or GenAI, is estimated to be $1.75 trillion annually across national, state or provincial, and local governments. The government market for GenAI applications is projected to grow at more than 50 percent per year. With growing access to GenAI tools in existing products their agencies already own (such as CoPilot with Microsoft 365 and Google Gemini in Google Workspace) government employees are fully embracing the GenAI era.

But GenAI is only as good as the data it utilises.

Enormous amounts of valuable government data is stored in record boxes on paper or in flat scanned files; formats that can’t be accessed by GenAI. The opportunity lies in unlocking this data and structuring it in a standardised and digitised format that GenAI tools can read. This structured data foundation is essential to realising the full operational value of GenAI for government workers and the citizens they serve.

GenAI to Empower the Government Employee

The stigma that GenAI is replacing human jobs is simply not true – GenAI is helping government employees do their jobs better. Cited in an article by Google in Government Technology, one survey found that 63 percent of government employees shared that “extensive or moderate changes are needed to enhance their workplace digital tools and technologies.” Fortunately, GenAI can drive those changes. GenAI can help civil servants feel more empowered and satisfied at work by automating mundane tasks, delivering faster access to data to make better decisions, and helping them focus on the strategic work that brought them into public service in the first place.

In one real-world example, we are seeing policy analysts increasingly adopt GenAI tools. A team of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University developed a new tool, named “GovScan,” to help policy analysts find key data points in government reports. Public servants regularly comb through PDF reports and other large documents, sometimes up to three to four hours, for relevant information needed for projects like policy and funding proposals. GovScan allows workers to efficiently search information spread across lots and lots of different documents. The platform uses large language modelling to help analysts find information in a matter of a few seconds. This highlights the critical importance of the data foundation. If these reports are not transformed into digital, structured formats, GovScan would not be able to operate.