With AI technology quickly infiltrating the workplace, economists are already seeing measurable signs of increasing worker productivity.
But a new study of government workers finds the public sector lagging behind in adopting AI, potentially missing out on efficiency improvements and saving taxpayer dollars. Locally, both Massachusetts state government and the City of Boston have introduced AI programs for their workers, but uptake has been slow thus far.
While AI executives and industry specialists have dominated public discussions on the theoretical risk of AI destroying civilization, workers across the economy have been increasingly using AI tools to be more productive. A recent Gallup poll of mostly private-sector workers found 45 percent used AI at least weekly. And a study by the St. Louis Fed last year found workers who used AI saved more than 2 hours a week, potentially increasing the productivity of the entire US economy by 1 percent.
But things look different in government workplaces. A new survey of about 100,000 government workers by the nonprofit InnovateUS training group found less than a quarter used AI weekly — about half the private sector rate.
On one level, the slower uptake makes sense, given the government’s role in sensitive areas like health care and some of the problems that have emerged with AI tools and security, from lawyers submitting briefs with hallucinated citations to more insidious bias uncovered in AI hiring software.
But a growing number of businesses have integrated AI successfully to improve basic functions, like answering questions on the phone and providing information in multiple languages, according to Northeastern professor Beth Simone Noveck, who founded InnovateUS and previously was chief innovation officer for the state of New Jersey.
Locally, Governor Maura Healey gave 40,000 executive branch workers access to ChatGPT in February under a three-year contract with OpenAI. But uptake has been slow: So far, only about 6,500 workers have used the tool, said Chris Smith, director of legislative affairs at the state’s Executive Office of Technology Services and Security.
State users get training and have already been using AI to monitor older software code and to translate information on web sites, Smith said.
“These ideas are coming from state employees themselves,” he said. “That was a key goal of the rollout: to give the workforce new tools and let the people who know their work best find useful ways to apply them.”
The City of Boston has rolled out AI to its workforce more slowly, chief information officer Shin-pei Tsay told the Globe.
About three years ago, the city first issued guidelines for using AI tools in writing and summarizing. Workers are required to take a training class before getting access to Gemini, the AI assistant from Google, Tsay said. The city also has a few other AI programs, such as one to time traffic lights and another that lets people query city data sets online using AI.
“I’m excited about the possibilities of government and I think AI is another tool we can use to make that happen,” Tsay said. “But just like everything else, we want to be careful and we want to do the right things.”
Noveck said training workers and rethinking how AI can fit into existing tasks are the keys to success. Workers in government also need to be trained about uses of AI tools that are allowed or forbidden, she added.
Government workers who have not yet used AI said they were being held back by a lack of knowledge and a lack of permission. In the survey, among non-users, 28 percent said they didn’t know how to apply the tools to their jobs, 23 percent said they didn’t know how to use the tools, and 19 percent said they weren’t sure they were allowed to use AI.
“We wouldn’t give you a car without teaching you how to drive and giving you a license,” Noveck said. “We shouldn’t be just giving people tools without an understanding not just of what it is, but how to use it in your job to serve the public.”
Examples of how states are using AI include Nevada seeking to reduce errors administering SNAP food programs and others to help new businesses fill out all of the forms necessary to get started, said Gary Blank, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston who has studied government AI use but is not affiliated with InnovateUS. He’d like to see governments in Massachusetts and elsewhere do more.
“There is a large gap between AI maybe ending all of humanity in 10 years versus employees using ChatGPT to be a little bit more efficient,” Blank said. “There’s a large gap in between those things, and don’t we want the government serving us finding those different use cases that are less scary, but make them more efficient, make them more effective?”
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🤑 Transportation AI software startup ASI in Boston raised $325 million in a deal led by Spark Capital that valued the company at $3 billion.
🤖 General purpose robotics company Eka Robotics in Cambridge raised $150 million in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime.
💰 The University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mass General Brigham won a five-year $24.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging for their Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging & Alzheimer’s Disease. The award follows a $20 million grant that supported the center from 2021 to 2026.
💸 Crypto-focused venture capital firm Breed VC, based in Boston and Miami, raised $15 million for its second fund.
🩺 Health care cybersecurity firm CloudWave in Marlborough was acquired by health care consulting firm Tegria, owned by private equity firm Altaris. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
🤝 Telecom tech firm Netnumber in Marlborough was acquired by Virginia-based Transaction Network Services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
🔒 Cybersecurity firm Transmit Security, headquartered in Boston and Tel Aviv, hired Matt Thompson as chief executive. Thompson previously was president at Socure and cofounder of ID.me.
👋 Private equity firm THL Partners in Boston hired Bruce Robertson as a managing director for health care investment. Robertson previously was a managing director at H.I.G. Capital.
🧬 Life sciences software firm Sware in Boston hired Erin Wright as chief product officer. Wright previously worked at MasterControl.
📩 After some local ups and downs, famed startup accelerator Techstars is taking applications through Nov. 18 for a program in Boston starting next March.
🚧 Google DeepMind, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence research and development wing, is constructing a robotics lab in Watertown.
✈️ The Federal Aviation Administration granted a special airworthiness certificate for market surveys to the vertical take-off plane made by electric aircraft manufacturer Beta Technologies in Burlington, Vt. It marked the FAA’s first such certification for a electric vertical takeoff craft, Beta said.
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