A top official from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said on Tuesday that his agency is looking to embrace artificial intelligence, starting by building a people-centric foundation.
At MeriTalk’s Accelerate AI Forum on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Vinay Singh, HUD’s chief financial officer and chief AI officer, noted that his agency only has one public AI use case so far.
In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) December report on the state of AI in the Federal government, HUD reported not having any AI use cases in fiscal year (FY) 2022. Singh is looking to change that, keeping people at the forefront of HUD’s AI efforts.
“First of all, AI to me literally is ‘all in,’ and LLMs – large language models – is really where HUD is, which is listening and learning mode,” Singh said. “We’re just trying to get caught up … but we’re working through that.”
“Deploying LLMs and other generative AI technologies in HUD, we’re probably 12 months away from that,” he added. “Right now, what I’m doing with the team is building a foundation that’s sustainable.”
Singh explained that he is a political appointee – which means that he likely won’t be in the same position in a year – but he is looking to “hire the right people” and build a highly-skilled AI team so that HUD is set up for success in the future.
Additionally, the chief AI officer explained that his agency is also looking to AI literacy to “get our folks up to speed.”
“The point is this is people-centric. So, we talk about AI and tech, but the way to actually roll this out is with people,” Singh said. “I really see this AI dynamic as also being a huge CX moment, it’s customer experience – changing the entire ability of government to change how they get services from the government.”
Dan Chaney, vice president of enterprise AI and data science solutions at Future Tech, a Dell Technologies Titanium Partner, agreed with Singh, noting that most AI problems that arise can often be attributed to a lack of communication between team members.
“The challenges are mostly coordination, and I don’t want to make that sound trivial, but it’s absolutely the key to success on every project that I have seen,” Chaney said. “I know it sounds corny, but collaboration and coordination are the keys to a successful AI infrastructure build and grow.”
He continued, adding, “That collaboration with process owners will help you figure out, ‘Am I doing it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it because this policy hasn’t changed since it was written in stone, or is there an opportunity here to do things a little better, faster, and more efficient?’”
