Alaska to launch AI-powered state services app

Within the next few weeks, Alaska plans to launch an AI-powered mobile app that provides a single point of access for all of its digital services, the state’s top technology official told StateScoop this week.

Alaska Chief Information Officer Bill Smith said the app, which will include an AI function to help people find the services they’re looking for, has been in development the past seven months. It’s designed, he said, to “demystify” the process of using government services.

“We really learned that the mobile app pathway has a lot more opportunity for making interaction with the government easier than maybe we even anticipated,” Smith said in a video interview during the National Association of State CIOs midyear conference in Philadelphia. 

Smith said the app will initially include approximately 50 services already available via the state’s online services portal, called myAlaska, and will eventually be extended to include more than 200 services.

He said the testing phase of the project has taken the longest, as state IT officials sought to hone the answers provided by the app’s AI chatbot.

“It was a little more work to really define and scope it down so we had a good level of confidence in its answers, but one of the nice aspects of that is we were only exposing it to publicly available information anyway, so we didn’t have data concerns,” Smith said. “We were really laser focused on accuracy and making sure it was the most efficient way to get people where they needed to go within the ecosystem of government services.”

Smith said developing the app has been a learning experience and that he now believes there’s much more potential for the state to develop additional capabilities.

“I think it ultimately may very well be one of the standard ways people engage with the state,” he said.