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GSA Launches Artificial Intelligence Community of Practice

| Steven Babitch
Post filed in: Innovation

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise to benefit nearly all aspects of society, and recent investment, research, and development in this field and has created significant opportunities for government transformation. The General Services Administration (GSA) and the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) are launching a government-wide AI Community of Practice (CoP) to harness those advancements and accelerate the thoughtful adoption of AI across the federal government.

When the President signed Executive Order 13859, Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, on February 11, 2019, it launched the American AI initiative to promote and protect AI technology and innovation in the United States. The initiative implements a government-wide strategy in collaboration and engagement with the private sector, academia, the public, and likeminded international partners.

The AI CoP will support and coordinate the use of AI technologies in federal agencies, including those related to:

  • Machine Learning and deep learning
  • Robotic Process Automation
  • Human-computer interactions
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Rule based automation
  • Robotics

The executive sponsors of the AI CoP are the Federal Chief Information Officer, Suzette Kent, and the Director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, Anil Cheriyan. The CoP will be administered out of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) Solutions division and will be led by Steven Babitch of the AI Portfolio who coordinates with the CIO Council’s Innovation Committee. TTS looks to build momentum around technology that has the potential to drive impact across the government.

The AI CoP will bring together federal employees who are active in, or interested in, AI policy technology, standards, and programs to:

  • Facilitate the sharing of best practices, use cases, and lessons learned, and
  • Advance and share tools, playbooks success stories with a community of interested professionals.

The group held its kickoff event last week at GSA which included discussions about chat-bots, AI use cases in grant making, and introduced a framework to assess problems for AI-based solutions. Interested federal government employees can join through the AI listserve with their .gov or .mil email address.