The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided an update on the progress its making on some of the agency’s own internal AI use cases that are either in the planning or implementation stages.
The Jan. 29 report – titled GAO’s Work to Leverage Technology and Ensure Responsible Use – comes as numerous Federal agencies are making their own moves into AI technology and reporting on use cases under development.
“By developing these tools, GAO is also gaining insight into the benefits and risks of AI, which will help GAO evaluate other agencies’ use and better provide technical assistance to Congress,” the watchdog agency said.
Some of the late-stage prototype use cases that the GAO is currently working on include organizing large volumes of text data, summarizing GAO legislative mandates, and assisting with copyediting according to the agency’s internal format.
The potential benefits of those projects include increasing efficiency, reducing manual processes, and automating some copyediting tasks.
Other AI use cases catalogued in the report that are still in their early stages of development include AI technology to summarize qualitative responses from annual GAO employee experiences surveys, monitoring information about congressional committees such as press releases and web content, and providing chat functions to published GAO work.
“One of our AI tools is a large language model we recently began deploying to explore generative AI capabilities like those found in industry, augmented with GAO-specific information and appropriate security controls,” stated the agency.
“Among other capabilities, we believe this prototype will help us efficiently synthesize our past work to meet congressional and taxpayer needs,” GAO said.
Two other AI use cases currently under exploration by the agency include enhancing GAO auditing through the use of augmented and virtual reality devices, and developing the capability to triage IT help desk requests and answers internal GAO policy questions.
“We constantly work to expand our expertise in science and technology generally, and in AI specifically, to ensure we can deliver oversight of and foresight into this rapidly advancing technology to Congress and enhance our internal operations,” GAO said.
