How the Government Publishing Office is using AI to enhance operations

NextGov: “The Government Publishing Office has been piloting and deploying artificial intelligence capabilities to simplify agency tasks, including developing internal AI-generated podcasts to help its personnel digest information in a more engaging manner. GPO’s top IT official said the agency’s early adoption of AI has allowed it to cautiously expand uses of the technology across its operations. In an interview with Nextgov/FCW, GPO Chief Information Officer Sam Musa said the agency’s AI journey first began in earnest in 2019, after he attended a class on the emerging capabilities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Musa, who was named the agency’s CIO in 2018, said he was interested in learning more about the technology and how it could be used to support GPO’s mission. This ultimately led to the creation of an AI-specific policy for the agency, which Musa said was meant to address some basic questions: “What is AI? How are we going to provide training to both the developers and the trainers — train the trainers, if you will — and employees? What areas can we leverage AI? What risks [are there] with AI?” The process of onboarding these new capabilities, however, was not fast and involved working with employees across GPO’s legal and IT units to determine appropriate safeguards.  Even though GPO is a legislative branch agency and does not explicitly have to follow executive branch guidance, for instance, Musa said the agency still adheres to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI risk management framework. He added that, while Microsoft Azure OpenAI “is the engine of our AI initiative,” it took GPO roughly two years to train its developers on how to use the capabilities.

Musa said one of the agency’s early lessons was that “AI is not cheap, and AI takes time to master,” adding that “you will do a lot of training [and] you do a lot of security assessments.” And security still remains top of mind for GPO.  “One thing we learned too — because they’re brand new, and everybody’s jumping on them — [AI tools] are still not considered secure by design,” he said. “So that’s a main concern that you’re always going to have to watch out for. Some of those tools are not FedRAMP certified. For us, that’s a showstopper. If a cloud tool is not FedRAMP certified, sorry, out of the picture.” GPO initially started with several AI pilots, Musa said, including an internal chatbot to help employees get clarifications on existing rules and policies. And while GPO is now also leveraging AI for document classification and summarization purposes, the agency is expanding its uses of these capabilities — including in novel ways…”