Pennsylvania government agencies aim to expand employees' use of artificial intelligence

Technical.ly

a day ago

Pennsylvania is pushing to expand the use of artificial intelligence tools in government agencies, and local governments are set to follow suit.
For local and state agencies, it's a way to ease the workload by directing artificial intelligence to complete routine tasks that would otherwise take hours — at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars.
As Pennsylvania leaders aspire to set the state up as an AI and data center hub, the commonwealth is one of the first states to examine generative AI usage across the state government.
The state launched a year-long generative AI pilot program last January, with 175 employees across 14 agencies incorporating ChatGPT Enterprise into their work, including brainstorming ideas or proofreading documents.
'The most frequent uses of ChatGPT among employees in the pilot were tasks like writing assistance, research, brainstorming, and summarizing large amounts of text or data — all of which can be applied broadly across our workforce,' said Dan Egan, communications director for the Office of Administration.
The state paid $108,000 for the ChatGPT Enterprise licenses, training, and support for the pilot program.
OpenAI even cited Pennsylvania's pilot program in a press release announcing ChatGPT Gov, designed specifically for government use.
A majority of employees in the pilot reported a positive experience and saved an average of 95 minutes per day using it — results that encouraged the state to do more with artificial intelligence.
'We want to provide more employees with responsible access to AI-powered tools when those tools can help employees work more effectively and efficiently,' Egan said. 'We are currently exploring ways to expand access to these tools to employees.'
He added that training on 'safe and responsible AI use' will be a prerequisite for any state employees to use AI tools.
But experts warn that AI, particularly generative AI — which outputs text, images, and even videos based on prompts users put in — poses a host of risks and ethical considerations.
Generative AI has a tendency to create falsehoods and present them as facts, a process known as hallucinating.
'You have to understand that generative AI in particular, it can be incorrect,' said Cole Gessner, responsible AI program manager at Carnegie Mellon University's Block Center for Technology and Society. 'You have to treat it almost like it's a summer intern, right? You have to double check its work.'
The Block Center advised the state on implementing AI in its pilot program and has worked with government leaders across Pennsylvania.
Now, the state Department of Human Services is considering the use of AI.
'The Department of Human Services is exploring opportunities to responsibly use AI to drive efficiencies that promote an employee-first approach,' DHS press secretary Brandon Cwalina said. 'As with any emerging technology, we have policies and oversight in place to guide its responsible use, and we will continue to assess advancements that may support our work.'
Currently, the commonwealth's AI policy prohibits using generative AI to make decisions for employees and requires the user to review and verify anything created by generative AI. It also prohibits putting any private data or information into generative AI tools.
All state IT policies are reviewed on an annual basis, and the commonwealth's AI policy is set to be reviewed in March.
While the state has a policy in place, most local governments don't have specific guidelines for how to handle AI use.
Allegheny County is an exception: it's developing an AI policy with hopes of finalizing it this year, said county spokesperson Abigail Gardner.
Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order in 2023 establishing standards for generative AI use in state government. It also created a Generative AI Governing Board to oversee policy and implementation.
In March, he created a Generative AI Labor and Management Collaboration Group, which takes input from employees and labor representatives when considering AI use in government.
'The Shapiro Administration has consistently emphasized that generative AI is not a replacement for the knowledge and experience of Commonwealth employees,' Egan said.
And while the statewide move to incorporate generative AI is new, AI has been used in government for years. Climate modeling, for example, has relied on machines locating patterns and analyzing large data sets, said Cole von Glahn, senior technology policy analyst at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center.
'A lot of what we do in the world relies on deep learning techniques that have been around for a very long time,' von Glahn said. 'The generative AI side of things, I think, is much more experimental. I can see ways in which it can be useful in government. Right now, I'm not convinced that those ways outweigh the risks.'
But for some elected officials, artificial intelligence is a promising tool to streamline bureaucratic processes, especially permitting.
'If you think about applying for a permit, it's going to be the same 12 boxes that everybody has to fill out. There are rules about how these things are analyzed by people,' von Glahn said. 'You can translate that to the way the machine would be looking at it.'
Rep. Jason Ortitay (R., Allegheny/Washington) hopes to launch a pilot program at a Department of Environmental Protection district office to test how AI could be used to process permit applications.
'It's got to be piloted and it's got to be tried and then trusted before it's adopted on a much broader scale,' he said. 'What you don't want to happen is you implement it and it causes all sorts of chaos, because that's not the whole point of it. The point is to make it better, streamlined, more efficient.'
He plans to discuss it with the DEP and Shapiro's office after the state budget is finalized.
The Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh is also examining the use of AI to streamline processes, specifically with housing applications.
HACP is finalizing a contract with Bob.ai, an AI company that partners with public housing authorities, to implement AI in the processing of recertifications. HAPC has around 5,100 tenants and most recertify every two years.
The yearlong pilot program is likely to begin this year, said Monty Ayyash, HACP's senior IT director. The HACP approved a payment of around $160,000 for the AI in June with an estimation that it would reduce processing times by up to 50% and backlog by up to 75%.
The HACP also launched a one-year pilot of Google Gemini for 60 of its employees in April. So far, employees have mainly used it to optimize communication, such as drafting internal documents or suggesting improvements to emails, Ayyash said.
'We're adding the AI component very conservatively,' he said. 'We are monitoring any sort of behavior that might indicate that it could really challenge the actual day-to-day business operations that our employees are used to doing, so we don't want to stop them from getting their job done in place of learning AI.'