Artificial Intelligence to Improve People Using Tech says CDG Poll

According to a poll released in 2019 by the Center for Digital Government (CDG), the National Association of Chief Information Officers, and IBM, just 13% of state governments, use artificial intelligence in some non-core element of their operations. However, the same survey three years later gave dramatically different findings. This week, Joe Morris of CDG presented some of the study’s 2021 findings at the NASCIO Annual Conference in Seattle. It was evident that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted how state and local governments think about AI.

This year, 60% of respondents said AI is now in use in their company, up from 1% in 2019. In addition, 6.7 percent said the technology is widely used across the state, up from 1% in 2019. The shift appears to be partly due to a surge in demand for government services in 2020 when the pandemic struck, and states tried to develop new ways to accommodate the vast number of citizen demands. For example, the CDG poll indicated that AI-powered chatbots were the answer to handling queries from overburdened call centers across the country.

In 2021, 60.4 percent of state respondents said they had utilized AI for digital assistants in the previous year. Natural language processing (47.9%) and robotic process automation (47.9%) were also popular (37.5 percent). Staffing concerns have been a significant source of concern in the government’s use of AI and machine learning. A shortage of professional people trained in AI was cited by over 80% of the states polled as a bottleneck to the technology’s implementation. There are, of course, more classic concerns about robots displacing humans and rendering human labor obsolete.