A Unified Strategy for Federal Agency Deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) October 24, 2024 By: Avi Bender

Civilian agencies are facing complex security, trust, and governance challenges in deploying AI enterprise solutions within their agencies. The OMB provided guidance and direction in Memorandum 24-10 of March 28, 2024, to address these challenges by requesting agencies to inform the public on how their AI implementations are advancing governance, innovation, and risk management. The OMB also directed agencies to report back on both the approach and the actual use of AI within their agencies. Responses back to the OMB from civilian agencies demonstrate, in my opinion, that there needs to be a more effective and efficient AI driven innovation process. A recommended way forward, to both comply with the intent of the OMB Memorandum, and to reduce risk and complexity is through a unified, secure, and federated approach. This approach is based on a scalable, standardized, and cloud based operational framework that takes away the burden of infrastructure, governance and security from the agency so that their focus is solely on the data and innovation. AI is all about the data. The role of data is critical for leveraging AI and therefore data alignment is required among the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Data Officer (CDO), Federal Records Officer (FRO), and now the AI Officer (AI). These functions within the civilian government also have their own strategies with respect to data and applications and it’s not clear to me how the data layer is aligned among these functions and the various strategies at each agency. Something needs to change. 

Innovation & Federal Employees
Employees of the Federal government have incredible opportunities to drive innovation because the government is a target rich environment for digital transformation. In Avi Bender’s experience leading the innovation lab at the US Census Bureau, he placed emphasis on collaboration and greater inclusion of agency employees as individual innovators in the business process of the agency. He recommends a collaborative approach that enlists feds from all business units to  process innovate through discipline-specific interest groups. These interest groups (much  like ACT-IAC’s Communities of Interest) provide content and business expertise from practitioners..