Texas governor names AI advisory board members

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday named eight members to a new AI advisory board tasked with guiding the state government’s use of artificial intelligence tools.

The new members of the board, officially called the Public Sector Artificial Intelligence Systems Advisory Board, include several agency chief information officers, the chief financial officer of the state’s criminal justice department, the public counsel of the state Office of the Public Insurance Counsel and two private-sector tech executives: Jaclyn Beerens, vice president of consulting services at the Canadian IT giant CGI, and Josh Chacona, regional vice president of solution engineering at Snowflake, a cloud storage and IT services firm headquartered in Montana.

The board is the product of a law enacted last June intended to guide the state’s adoption of AI tools. The new law is also an outgrowth of the state’s Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, which was created in 2023 to study the state’s use of AI systems and then disbanded at the start of this year.

State Sen. Tan Parker, who introduced the bill creating the new board, has said the state needs to balance accountability and individual rights with the government’s embrace of new AI technologies. The new law establishes an AI code of ethics that, upon the bill’s introduction last April, Parker described as promoting innovation, “while at the same time providing guardrails that protect civil liberties and personal data.”

“By narrowing our scope to higher-risk AI, we preserve innovation for everyday low-risk systems,” said Parker, a Republican. 

He also advertised the bill’s creation of an AI sandbox, overseen by the Department of Information Resources, the state’s technology bureau, to provide a safe testing ground for new uses of AI, “to see what works, to refine technologies, to gather essential feedback before these tools are more widely deployed.”

Parker outlined the legislation’s new reporting and implementation requirements for agencies. Members of the public must be notified when they’re interacting with AI tools, under the new law. It also creates a formal process through the state attorney general’s office for members of the public to report cases of AI violating individual rights. But he also highlighted the potential for AI software to reduce government costs and “deliver more efficient services to Texans.”

“Members,” Parker told the state Senate’s Business and Commerce committee, “Texas will be the nation’s leader in AI, make no mistake about it.”