The growth of AI technology is coming on at a “fast and furious” pace, and Federal agencies need to buckle in and prepare themselves for the technology’s rapid proliferation, a panel of Federal agency chief information officers said this week.
One of the agency CIOs who discussed that trend in depth was Guy Cavallo, CIO at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at ATARC’s 2023 CIO Summit on Dec. 13.
“What I hear from people is we’re not ready for it, we don’t have staff or we need skills,” he said. “Too bad, it’s here … you have to move. We’ve never had a technology hit us as fast and be available worldwide in a short period of time,” Cavallo said.
“You should be using AI for cybersecurity protections because our adversaries are using AI to attack you, and humans will lose in that battle over cybersecurity. So, at a minimum, we want to make sure you’re already using AI,” he said.
Sheena Burrell, CIO for information services at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), talked about finding qualified candidates who know how to utilize AI technology tools.
“I actually think that one of the biggest challenges even with the AI executive order is really kind of the skills gaps … in terms of the IT workforce and will we be ready for something that monumental,” she said.
“I think that what we’re trying to do right now is upskill some of our employees that may have had some experience in this realm … to really kind of make use of different technology platforms that have AI training, [and] also looking at other AI training outside of just our workforce,” continued Burrell.
During the panel discussion, Michael Anthony, CIO in the Office of the Managing Director at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) talked about how his agency has been moving on using AI to automate some processes.
“How do we make sense of all that noise? I really think that’s where some of the AI capabilities can assist us. And we’re exploring how we can leverage you know, NLP [natural language processing] and machine learning tool in some of these processes,” said Anthony.
