The chatbot is aimed at making the process of looking for NSF grants easier, Dorothy Aronson, the agency’s chief AI officer told FedScoop. It will provide information about grants based on inputs from users about who they are and their research and can answer questions about the process, as it was trained using NSF’s proposal guide, Aronson said.

Aside from testing the chatbot itself, the process has also been a test of sorts for the agency, according to Aronson. 

“The most important thing about this exercise that we’re running is that it’s not only to create the chatbot; I think that’s a nice side effect,” Aronson said. “From my perspective, it’s to experience what it’s like to do a rapid implementation … of an AI capability.”

Aronson said they’re hoping to engage the NSF community in a conversation about responsible AI, how they can do that well at the agency, and get people thinking about the future.

The pilot comes as agencies across the government are experimenting with AI. Already the government has disclosed at least 700 use cases, and chatbots appear to be a popular use of the technology, with agencies like the Department of State and Centers and Disease Control and Prevention recently noting they’re using such tools. 

Although the chatbot is NSF’s first pilot of a commercial platform and first for a public-facing tool, it’s not the first AI use for the agency. NSF lists several use cases on its public inventory, and Aronson said the agency has developed smaller AI solutions before, such as a tool that suggests reviewers for people who work with NSF on research. 

The first three months of the pilot are wrapping up, marking the end of the development phase, according to an NSF spokesperson. Now, the agency is “beginning to widely demonstrate the pilot, gather feedback, and further train and hone the model.” NSF is working with Spatial Front, Inc., a small business contractor, on the chatbot. 

The chatbot will be particularly useful to people outside larger universities, which typically have offices dedicated to things like NSF grants, according to Aronson, who is also the chief data officer and has served as the CIO of the agency.

“This is most important to smaller universities or underrepresented communities who do not have access to large offices within their university that can help facilitate that work,” she said. 

Creating the tool has also been different from the norm for IT solutions, which start with what the end result will look like, Aronson said. With AI, the component is educated to give the desired answers and the interface comes after. “It’s a completely different way of working,” she said.

Aronson said the agency has put the first skin — or appearance — on the chatbot and shopped it out to customers to get feedback. Now, NSF is thinking about two directions: how to improve the chatbot further and what the next AI pilot will be, she said.

Going forward, Aronson said the agency plans to do a few pilots to find additional capabilities of the technology. “In the next one, we know we want to do something more complicated, ultimately, and we’ve broken that more complicated longer-term objective into smaller bits,” Aronson said. 

She also noted that while funding is tight this year, NSF is being “scrappy” about ways to move forward, and using the pilots to help figure out what to ask for in fiscal year 2026 so it has a “legitimate funding bucket for AI.” 

Additionally, Aronson said she’s working with the Federal CIO and CIOs at other agencies to explore the idea of “a journey map of data and AI and IT initiatives that would allow all of the federal agencies better insight into what other people are doing.” 

That journey map would allow agencies to get a picture of what others in the federal government are working on and learn about other solutions they could leverage, she said. An agency, for example, could use the map to see if another agency is developing a testbed for AI, identify extra compute power available elsewhere, or review an existing generative AI policy. 

If agencies could see “where the expertise was across the federal government, we could leverage each other’s expertise instead of each of us evolving to have that level of knowledge on our own,” Aronson said.

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“Of our workforce, there are a lot of people who haven’t been playing with ChatGPT,” State Chief Information Officer Kelly Fletcher said Thursday at AIScoop’s AITalks event in Washington, D.C. “We’re encouraging them to do so, but they need training.”

The internal chatbot, which FedScoop previously reported on, is an example of how the agency is weighing how generative AI might help with tasks like summarization and translation. It comes in response to staff demand. 

Beyond the chatbot, the State Department is using artificial intelligence for other purposes, including declassifying documents, said Matthew Graviss, the agency’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer. The department is also using open-source models to help create a digital research assistant for certain mandated reports, though he didn’t name those documents.  

The department is also using public tools with public information to help synthesize information for ambassadors, Graviss said. “You don’t need FedRAMP this and FISMA that to do that kind of stuff,” he added. “Public tools work.” 

Earlier this month, FedScoop reported that the Department of State had removed several references to artificial intelligence use cases in its executive order-required inventory. 

Other agencies, meanwhile, have taken a variety of approaches to generative AI, with some more cautious about exploring the technology. Others are setting up sandboxes to explore generative AI tools, working, for instance, with versions of OpenAI tools available on Azure for Government. 

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Kelly Fletcher, State’s chief information officer, said during a speech Tuesday at Palo Alto Networks’s Public Sector Ignite event that the creation of a generative AI chatbot is something that the agency’s workforce is asking for as publicly available tools like ChatGPT become more popular.

“The thing I hear most that people want is, they want a chatbot,” Fletcher said. “We’re gonna let people experiment, we’re gonna see what they use it for and then we are gonna move to building things that are more custom fit for State.”

Fletcher provided examples of how the gen AI tool could help with translation needs, including the loading of a 30-page document written in Russian into a model and asking for a summary in English, and inputting public information from other countries — such as regional news — into systems and receiving an English summary.

In addition to improving user experience and increasing productivity “dramatically,” Fletcher said that having this tool — a pilot effort led by the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions Center for Analytics and the Bureau of Information Resource Management — could enhance cybersecurity, since employees would be using the chatbot on the agency’s secured network.

“We can load public information into publicly available chatbots, get a summary, get some hints, get started. But I want to do that with data that’s unclassified but specific to the State Department, where it wouldn’t be appropriate for it to get hoovered up into the world,” Fletcher said. “What I don’t want is State Department data leaving the State Department environment.”

Separately, in its AI use case inventory, the agency noted that the Bureau of Information Resource Management is “planning to incorporate” a virtual agent or chatbot — provided by ServiceNow as part of its platform as a service — into existing applications to offer users support and connect users with data requests.

The agency declined to comment further on Fletcher’s speech.

This story was updated April 4, 2024, after State corrected the bureau in its AI use case inventory that is planning to incorporate a virtual agent or chatbot. The update also included newly provided information regarding the bureaus piloting the new chatbot.

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The update has not been previously published and details on the chatbot training method have not yet been established, the agency told FedScoop.

Still, the eventual upgrade comes as the VA tries to expand ways that veterans can discuss this critical and sensitive topic. In June, the agency announced that its 1-800-MyVA411 hotline can now be used to report sexual harassment or sexual assault at VA facilities. 

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told FedScoop in a statement: “While the www.VA.gov chatbot platform has been active for over a year, each new feature that is part of our minimally viable product is released iteratively. So rather than classifying a feature mid-conversation with the user, VA decided to keep the beta classification at the platform level for now. Other Government agencies such as the Federal Student Aid do the same.”

“Whenever possible VA connects Veterans in crisis to experts directly and does not use chatbots as a replacement for direct crisis intervention,” he added. “The chatbot carries a disclaimer clearly stating that it is not a personal, medical, or mental health emergency bot. However, a level of sexual assault-related bot training is part of the fiscal year 2023 roadmap as an extension of the existing Veteran Crisis Line bot response.”

It’s not yet clear what the update will involve. John Davisson, an attorney at the Electronic Information Privacy Center, noted that the chatbots like these should make clear that they’re not meant for submitting personal identifying information — and emphasized the importance of cybersecurity safeguards.

“It should expunge at the end of the chat all information associated with a user’s interaction with the chat if they are seeking support relating to a sexual assault. Because it is — of course — possible that someone will, despite instructions otherwise,  end up submitting personal information or information that could be linked to them,” added Davisson. 

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Earlier this week, Chief Administrative Officer Catherine L. Szpindor sent a memo to all House staff saying that offices are only authorized to use the paid version of the AI tool known as ChatGPT Plus, which has a $20-per-month subscription that “incorporates important privacy features that are necessary to protect House data.” 

Furthermore, Szpindor highlighted that offices are allowed to use the chatbot for “research and evaluation only” and are “not authorized to incorporate it into regular workflow” or use it for any official purposes.

Lieu — a member of the House Artificial Intelligence Caucus and one of three members of Congress with a computer science degree — pushed back on the CAO’s new rules during an interview with FedScoop, saying he planned to reach out to the CAO with a number of questions on the decision.

“I don’t believe all this is [necessary]. I don’t understand why they’re making any statements about workflow. I think that’s something within the province of each member’s office, and each member can figure out how they want the workflow of their office to function,” Lieu told FedScoop during an interview on the subject of AI in Congress.

“And so if they’ve determined that ChatGPT is not a security threat, which it looks like they’ve determined that, then I think every office should use it as they deem fit,” he said. 

FedScoop first reported in April that the House of Representatives’ digital service had obtained 40 licenses of ChatGPT Plus, the first publicized congressional use of the popular AI tool. House offices said they were using ChatGPT for generating constituent response drafts and press documents, summarizing large amounts of text in speeches, and drafting policy papers or, in some cases, bill language.

Earlier this year, Lieu introduced the first measure in Congress that was written entirely by ChatGPT with a nonbinding resolution on how to comprehensively regulate AI in Congress.

Similarly, he said he gives his staff immense freedom to use tech tools without restrictions.

“So I put an enormous amount of trust in my staff, and my staff can basically do whatever they want. So if they feel like looking something up on Google Bard they can do that. If they want to use ChatGPT to draft, do the first draft of a document [or policy], they can do that,” Lieu said.

The California congressman said his staff regularly uses ChatGPT for regular day–to–day purposes but wasn’t sure if they use the CAO-authorized ChatGPT Plus service. Lieu added that his staff would look into getting the paid version of the tool if they weren’t already using it.

The CAO’s ChatGPT guidance comes as lawmakers from both parties and in both chambers are rushing to craft legislation on how to regulate AI, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY., and Lieu, who is pushing for a new bipartisan AI regulatory commission. 

The House Chief Administrative Office said the memo is not enforceable by law but is intended to provide best practice guidance based on internal research and procedures.

“Our intent in providing this information on ChatGPT was to explain best practice guidance consistent with our approved processes and procedures,” a CAO spokesperson told FedScoop. “Our House Cyber team will study this closely and continue to advise offices on the appropriate use of emerging technology.”

The CAO memo regarding limits and restrictions on ChatGPT use in Congress was first reported by Axios.

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The Foundation’s Chief Information Officer, Dorothy Aronson, said Wednesday that the independent agency, which supports and funds major science and engineering research across universities and institutions in the U.S., has started considering the role ChatGPT and other such AI tools could play within the agency.

“We are building a set of use cases for our appropriate use of ChatGPT so that we can have pros and cons in our guardrails,” Aronson said during FedScoop’s ITModTalks on Wednesday.

“So the tool is amazing. But right now, for example, we’re very careful about the way we ask questions, because we don’t want to release privileged information into the wild without really understanding where it’s going,” she added.

Major AI developer OpenAI in November released its ChatGPT tool, allowing users to interact with an artificial intelligence chatbot which has astounded users, writing short college essays, cover letters, unique poetry, and a weirdly passable Seinfeld scene in which Jerry needs to learn the bubble sort algorithm.

OpenAI yesterday released a powerful new image- and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, which the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”

ChatGPT does not represent a revolution in machine learning as such but is significant in regards to how users interact with it. Previous versions of OpenAI’s large language models require users to prompt the model with an input. ChatGPT, which relies on a tuned version of GPT-3.5, OpenAI’s flagship large language model, makes it far easier to interact with that model by making it possible to carry a fluid conversation with a highly trained AI. 

The National Science Foundation is excited about ChatGPT’s potential use within the agency, Aronson said, but highlighted that federal employees and citizens who use it for government services need to be careful about what information they feed highly sophisticated AI tools.

“So our main concerns about ChatGPT are what data you provide it in questions. And in general, we would prefer people be conservative in their use of it, so we’ve got a few guardrails set up like you can’t determine an NSF grant award winner using chat GPT,” Aronson said.  

Prior to her time at NSF, Aronson served as the Director for the Office of Management Operations for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) which is the agency where the internet and AI first made major breakthroughs.

Aronson was speaking at ITModTalks, which was hosted in Washington D.C. by FedScoop.

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Modernizing contact center operations with cloud-enabled infrastructure promises a more agile approach in the face of crisis or surge events, according to a new report, produced by Scoop News Group, and underwritten by TTEC.

Read the full report.

Moreover, by moving contact centers away from legacy infrastructure, agencies can integrate automation and ai-enabled tools that connect the front-end citizen interactions with other downstream workflow processes at the agency.

The report describes how agencies, like the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS), deployed cloud and automation technology to deflect calls from at-capacity systems. Additionally, they were able to use an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) to provide rapid answers to routine questions, resulting in a 24% decrease in call frequency.

TTEC’s Director of Public Sector, Ryan Haywood explains that injecting a layer of digital interaction with the agency before connecting to a live agent is one of the most effective ways agencies have found to streamline surges in requests. That is achieved by incorporating new communication channels such as text messaging, chatbots and other automation tools to make interactions more efficient.

By integrating automation technology, agency contact centers have been able to reduce operations costs, improve employee and constituent satisfaction and provide greater agility to react to surge events, according to Amber Rosebaugh, director of government technology strategy for TTEC.

“When an agency automates the back-end processes, response times also accelerate for the citizen,” she explained.

Read more about FedRAMP-authorized contact center solutions that are designed to deliver better citizen experiences. 

This article was produced by FedScoop and StateScoop and sponsored by TTEC.

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On top of that, a dozen machine learning and artificial intelligence projects are in the pilot or developmental phase, while four more are fully operational, according to an agency spokesperson.

The projects are part of GSA‘s “eliminate, optimize or automate” effort over the last two years, an effort that’s only speeding up over time, the spokesperson said.

“We expect that the velocity of AI/ML adoption will accelerate similar to our [robotic process automation] program over the next few years,” the spokesperson said. “The various pilots and projects are on different deployment timeframes but cover all our primary mission areas including Public Buildings Service, Federal Acquisition Service, finance, IT and HR.”

One such project is the Solicitation Review, which uses supervised ML to predict whether federal IT solicitations posted to beta.SAM.gov are compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which lays out IT accessibility requirements. The tool helps GSA employees more efficiently review solicitations and reduces the risk of noncompliance.

A second automation project is a virtual assistant that provides employees with IT self-help capabilities.

GSA doesn’t rely on one procurement method for AI services, instead using a number of contracts to encourage competition and equity among small and disadvantaged businesses. Such contracts are made available to other agencies as well.

Automation spans a number of technologies including ML, natural language processing, chatbots and RPA — the last of which is often the lowest-hanging fruit for agencies. The State Department, Social Security Program, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Department of Labor, Army, Air Force, and Navy are among the agencies that have RPA programs.

A big reason automation projects are on the rise governmentwide is the Federal RPA Community of Practice (CoP) and its voluntary leadership team within GSA, said Jim Walker, chief technology officer at UiPath, during a recent ACT-IAC event.

The government-only user group launched in 2019 and has grown to 69 member agencies and about 1,200 attendees on monthly calls.

In November, the CoP issued a State of Federal RPA report —the first detailed review of the technology across government. The report found a 110% increase in deployed automations between fiscal 2019 and 2020.

Additionally, the report found a 195% increase in capacity hours created.

The CoP created a maturity model for agencies to gauge their RPA progress and saw a 70% increase in Level 4 projects, which went from zero to five between fiscal 2019 and 2020.

While only 23 agencies participated in the first report, that number should grow with enthusiasm for RPA.

GSA Chief Financial Officer Gerard Badorrek recently oversaw a 100-day, industry-wide challenge to create RPA solutions that improved the experience for agencies submitting budget justifications. A total of 10 RPA solutions came out of the event, and 12 employees were trained in the technology.

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The Partnership for Public Service and Microsoft published a report that presents case studies on how federal and state governments utilized technology in response to COVID-19. The report points out that the most successful agencies already had a strong technological foundation with ongoing modernization efforts and have focused on putting the user at the heart of their solutions. Those with decades-old hardware and software, however, did not fare as well in their service delivery during the pandemic.

Indeed, one of the biggest lessons learned, according to the report, is the importance of user-centered design in technology solutions. In the first three weeks of the pandemic, for example, the Department of Veterans Affairs rolled out a chatbot to respond to the sharp increase in online inquiries. Its job was to handle frequently asked questions about COVID-19, such as how the virus could impact existing benefits and services, so that call center representatives were free to help with more complex questions.

The chatbot saw 53, 000 unique user sessions in the first few months, responding to twice as many COVID-19 questions as the VA tier 1 contact center at its peak usage.

The Small Business Administration also used technology to connect to its user base. To sift through the large volume of emails — especially after Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program and other relief programs for small businesses — the agency created a language sentiment analytical tool to stay on top of what it was doing well and how they needed to improve service.

“It allowed us to inform new frequently asked questions. It also allowed us to inform policy updates because these economic recovery programs were in the evolutionary stages,” Sanjay Gupta, CTO for the Small Business Administration, said during a panel on the report’s findings. “As we learned more from the customer sentiment, it allowed us to figure out what changes were necessary to make to our environment.”

The report recommends that agencies “create technology based on user needs and expectations” that continually takes into account user feedback during development and beyond.

Of course, technology also enabled agencies to transition to telework. Gupta noted that digital workflows that were once a hard sell, such as digital signatures, were easily adopted once the pandemic hit. The agency “didn’t miss a beat” serving the public after the changes, proving their efficacy.

“We can do the work, we have done the work and we can continue to do digital-only workflows,” he said.

It’s the same at other agencies, like the Department of Energy.

“I haven’t signed a physical piece of paper since March 13 or something like that,” said Christopher Fall, director of the Office of Science in DOE. “That’s a big change, and I’d say a welcome change.”

Besides pursuing user-centered design, the report recommends agencies build a technology foundation, rethink mission delivery through technology and take steps to narrow the digital divide.

The report’s authors hope that agencies can use the common lessons learned to adapt to the “new normal.”

“When governments look to use technology in the future, the goal shouldn’t be a return to the pre-pandemic status quo,” said Peter Kamocsai, project leader for the report.

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As government agencies confront unprecedented demands for services, from unemployment relief to health care support, AI and ML, along with the agility of cloud computing, have become crucial tools in keeping up with scale and scope of demands by the public and on employees’ time.

Read the full report.

These technology-enabled tools are also demonstrating what the future of government looks like, suggests a new report produced by FedScoop and underwritten by Google Cloud.

“Technology is now the core competency of mission delivery, and agencies need to rationalize their portfolios now so that they can stop accumulating technical debt,” says Todd Schroeder, director, public sector digital strategy at Google Cloud.

However, AI implementation remains unfamiliar territory for many government leaders, he says. Having the right partners at the table — with experience developing AI-assisted processes — is an important factor to deliver more meaningful outcomes and long-term benefits to the public, at scale.

It starts with the recognition that AI isn’t so much a technology to buy and deploy. AI’s transformative power lies in how agencies use it to reimagine the mechanics of work.

AI-assisted technology and access to cloud services were instrumental in helping agencies respond to the massive surge in unemployment insurance requestions. A 2020 NASCIO report surveying state CIOs found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. states deployed chatbots to assist with questions on unemployment insurance, general COVID-19 questions or other agency services that are receiving unusually high traffic due to the pandemic.

By implementing turnkey tools like Google’s Contact Center AI, for instance, agencies, like Illinois’ Department of Unemployment, were able to quickly deploy intelligent agents to predict and answer citizen’s most frequent questions.

Being able to take a 30-year old mainframe and adjust it for 120 new questions to satisfy constituents’ most urgent questions can be done at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a legacy system, Schroeder says.

Not only do government agencies have thousands of calls and high online traffic demand on their systems, but they’re also drowning in paper, Schroeder says. One of the things that AI and ML allow organizations to do is rapidly process paper documents by pulling data and transmitting that information automatically.

A growing array of cloud-based AI tools are available on a FedRAMP-authorized computing environment, according to the report. These tools — along with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in machine learning — can help agencies streamline how they develop and manage AI components and workflow into their projects, Schroeder says.

Read more about establishing a new normal for government services with AI.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Google Cloud.

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