State tech officials want more supporting AI roles, report shows

As uses of generative artificial intelligence expand in government, state officials say they need more supporting AI roles.

According a report published Wednesday by the research and advocacy nonprofit Govern for America, chief AI officers said three additional AI roles are necessary to carry states through deployment: AI director, product manager and policy manager. The finding comes from a survey of several state state chief AI officers, state chief information officers, or equivalent roles, in 11 states.

The report notes that since the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, governors of at least 32 states have launched AI task forces, working groups or similar governance initiatives. Additionally, state CIOs last year collectively ranked AI as their second highest policy priority, only behind cybersecurity.

But the report said a lack of dedicated funding for AI in many states has them to draw on their existing IT workforces to tackle deployment, by adding AI to titles and job functions. While most AI chiefs said the three AI-dedicated IT roles are necessary, they also said creating additional leadership roles in state agencies operating AI can help expand the impact of resource-constrained AI teams.

States generally follow a six-step process to roll out new AI tools, which takes about two years, according to the report. Steps include naming an AI director, issuing guidelines, raising awareness, sourcing use cases, launching standard solutions and prototyping custom solutions.

For building custom AI solutions, researchers found, pilot programs experience up to a 50% failure rate.

“The steps are not necessarily sequential, and may be repeated — for example, some states issued an initial set of responsible use guidelines in early 2023, and have since issued successive updates. One respondent told us, ‘About half the things we tried didn’t end up working. There is a big iteration loop,'” the report read. “In repeating steps, State leaders used learnings from failed pilots or flawed policies to help craft more successful efforts.”

Gov. Josh Shapiro last month shared early results of a ChatGPT pilot — one project cited in Govern for America’s report — which he said was saving staff 8 hours of work per week. Harrison MacRae, Pennsylvania’s director of emerging technology, on Wednesday confirmed the findings at a technology conference in Philadelphia hosted by the National Association of State CIOs.

“They reported, on average, saving about 95 minutes per day on the days they used ChatGPT, which, while that is a self-reported, kind of time-saving benchmark, to us, really affirmed some of the directionality there in terms of folks for receiving that value,” MacRae said of the pilot program. “And it really gave us all the great insights of how can we set our folks up for success in the future, in terms of what were the types of barriers to adoption they saw, and how, as we build up this program or create more pathways to future tools, again, really set people up for success, which I think is a theme of using some of these tools responsibility.”