Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene

The headlines are full of exciting news about the potential use of artificial intelligence in the public sector. States, localities and the federal government are all in the game, looking to use this technology to help grapple with streams of data and to help leaders make decisions.

But the expanding use of AI challenges government to use this technology fairly and well.

At the close of 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) didn’t crack the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ list of the “top ten priorities” for the coming year. However, by December 2023 AI took third place, and could well be number one by the end of this year. 

As advances in AI move at seemingly lightning speed, understanding its benefits, challenges and solutions to those in the public sector has become essential.

Over the last few years, hundreds of billions of dollars have been made available, directly or indirectly, to benefit states and local governments.

Historically, state and local governments have been prescriptive in their job descriptions, requiring a pre-set level of education, professional experience and even specific skills in various pieces of software.

But that’s changing, as a growing number of governments are dropping degree and years of experience requirements for certain roles, and instead emphasizing skills.

For the most part, we’ve pointed to issues that require careful examination of the information to determine if its trustworthy or not.

But, as time has passed, we’ve come across a great many signals, easily spotted and identified, that point to quicker recognition that information should be scrutinized. Here are a half dozen examples:

The dedicated government officials we were observing had started their days at the crack of dawn preparing for the work ahead, and then were in back-to-back meetings for hours on end. By late afternoon, we noticed that many could barely keep their eyes open (and at least a few failed in that effort, at least for a few seconds at a time).

That leaves the nation with nine new governors, all of whom will have assumed their new jobs by January 18. They include Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Katie Hobbs of Arizona; Josh Green of Hawaii, Wes Moore of Maryland, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Jim Pillen of Nebraska, Joe Lombardo of Nevada, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Joshua Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

But as football great Rocky Bleier once said, “Preconceived ideas can sometimes become barriers.”  That’s been the unfortunate case with portions of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program that was passed in 1996 with the intent of overhauling welfare through very flexible block grants to the states. A preconceived idea that there was one be-all end-all performance measurement has thwarted some of the elements in the program’s original vision.

In fact, over the decades of observing the ebb and flow of management efforts in state and local governments, we’ve seen that often the ethos of an organization is just as important as the statutes it puts on the books.