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Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to emerge as a transformative force, revolutionizing legacy processes and modernization efforts.
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 utilizes.
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 standardized and digitized format that GenAI tools can read. This structured data foundation is essential to realizing the full operational value of GenAI for government workers and the citizens they serve.
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 modeling 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.
In a recent report by Harvard Business Review, 60 percent of sampled U.S. residents report a strong preference for digital channels in government interactions, compared to phone and in-person. If digital channels represent phase one of the Citizen Experience revolution, GenAI is ushering in phase two. Think about a world where government agencies are proactively delivering information and services based on a person’s unique situation - from sending a text reminder to renew a license, to emailing benefit enrollment forms to Veterans. GenAI has the power to take the onus off of citizens to hunt down the information they need and instead, be a guide to navigate these often complex interactions.
Conversational chatbots are among the most widely applicable GenAI use cases. Services such as Benefits.gov have leveraged chatbots to help handle a massive influx of common questions from the public, routing more complicated questions to human staff to answer. These chatbots use traditional AI algorithms, and GenAI is only making them smarter. A chatbot with generative responses can address unanticipated questions, tailor replies to be more user-friendly, and prompt people to instant message as if talking to a real person.
The GenAI era presents endless opportunities for government agencies to enhance efficiency, citizen experience, and overall service delivery. To get there, agencies need to start building their data foundation now and unlocking the right data to feed these transformational GenAI models.
To learn more about how Iron Mountain is helping government customers build their data foundations to catalyze GenAI, visit https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/landing-pages/d/discover-your-data-possibilities-data-foundation
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