ChatGPT saving staff 8 hours per week, Pennsylvania governor says

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Friday shared preliminary results from the state’s ChatGPT pilot program, noting that the generative artificial intelligence tool was a “job enhancer” for most employees, saving each worker an average of eight hours per week.

During a press conference Friday, Shapiro shared successes from the state’s first-in-the-nation pilot program to integrate generative AI into government services, which was created by an executive order he signed January 2024. The state originally paid for 50 licenses of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise product.

Shapiro said the program has grown to include 175 employees across 14 agencies. Participants were provided training and face-to-face support.

“Commonwealth employees overwhelmingly found generative AI useful in their work, despite the fact that 48% of those 175 employees never ever used ChatGPT before this pilot,” Shapiro said Friday. “Eighty-five percent of them reported to us that they had a positive experience using AI.”

The first phase of the program will conclude on May 31, and a second phase will kick off, allowing more employees access to ChatGPT for their daily work.

Shapiro said the program has revealed that AI’s role in government is a “job enhancer,” not a replacer, and he highlighted the importance of human involvement.

The governor also said that a variety of roles, including state attorneys and construction project managers, participated. He said using ChatGPT saved employees about 95 minutes of work every day, which comes out to eight hours a week or 30 hours each month that state employees can instead use to “handle the more complex cases, maybe spend more time on the phone or in person, helping a fellow Pennsylvanian with their specific needs.”

“It’s important to note that I think this is only the beginning of what is possible,” Shapiro said. “Commonwealth employees got more stuff done because they used this important tool from OpenAI. But to be clear, we also found that AI isn’t just the right tool for every single job, and its success depends on keeping a human in the loop — meaning, the tools in people’s hands are helpful, but they can’t do it alone. We’ve got to have that human in the loop. It actually worked best on the kinds of tasks that helped enhance employees efficiencies.”

The governor said some of the operational successes from using the tool included helping commonwealth employees simplify job descriptions, which he said accelerated hiring and onboarding from 90 days to 60 days. He said it also helped the state’s IT team consolidate 93 complicated policies into just 34.

“While generative AI is a powerful tool, it is not a replacement for the employee’s experience and expertise, and that is critically important, and that is something I think we suspected going into this, but we certainly learned from listening to our employees,” Shapiro said. “We found that human nuance and experience is essential to getting the most out of AI.”