Government agencies around the world are leveraging AI technologies to enhance their operations, improve the efficiency of public services, and better manage data and records. We wrote last year about some of the ways government agencies are harnessing AI in records management, where we discussed auto-filling metadata with AI, AI-enabled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request responses, and well as other pilot projects and potential uses.
In the months since, AI has continued to expand its footprint and portfolio of applications in government. Here are a few more ways that AI is being used or tested for use in government and records management.
AI Chatbot for Evidence Management
AI-company Veritone has released a “new conversational intelligence solution” for law enforcement officers to help them manage evidence. They can interact with the tool conversationally and use it in sophisticated ways. “So, with that, an investigator can Ask Veri to create a list of all the moments when a gun appeared in a video, or provide me a summary report of an interview room jail house call, or create a timeline of when a particular officer engaged with the suspect,” Veritone spokesperson Andrew Ellison told Government Technology.
AI-enabled Drug Research & Development
The state of West Virginia is investing in a joint project with tech firm GATC West Virginia Inc. to combat the state’s opioid overdose rate, which exceeds the national average. The idea is to build an AI tool that can comb through relevant research and documentation and help researchers and state officials find “more effective and safer drugs within our state,” says state Senator Tom Takubo. Even better, AI tools can simulate human physiology and predict experimental outcomes. These simulations cannot substitute for actual clinical trials, obviously, but they can help point researchers in the right direction—and potentially reduce costs by as much as a hundredfold in the process.
AI-Powered Digitization
NASA and the National Science Foundation are working with AI startup Docugami to find ways to digitize analog records. One of the big challenges in transitioning to electronic records management—as many federal agencies have been discovering over the past few years—is that it’s not as simple as just scanning a document. The data and information resident within the record must be extrapolated so that the electronic record will be indexable, searchable, and usable. NASA and the NSF are hoping that AI tools will be able to automatically “recognize and categorize data in documents and then mark up that data to create a structured document.”
AI Automation in Court Filing Systems
Last year, Texas-based Tyler Technologies, which offers technology platforms to courts and state and local justice systems across the country, acquired Orlando-based Computing System Innovations (CSI), which sells AI-based automation, redaction, and indexing services to courts and legal entities. The hope is to integrate their products to use AI to reduce the complexity and tedium of manually creating and managing court documents. “We have seen great demand from the public sector—and courts specifically—for AI-powered document automation that significantly reduces manual labor of document review and data entry,” says Henry Sal, president and CEO of CSI.
One note of caution: government AI projects should always be carefully tested, managed, and monitored. An AI Chatbot recently deployed by New York City to help entrepreneurs was found to be advising users to break the law! AI tools can be enormously helpful, but they are not magic, perfect, or a cure-all.
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