AI Potential to Elevate Government Services Needs Private Sector Support, OTSP Official Says

Artificial intelligence can help deliver a higher caliber of government services with the support of the private sector and academia, Arati Prabhakar, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy director and a Wash100 awardee, said.

During an event that OTSP hosted to showcase AI’s potential and gains across 12 government research and development agencies, Prabhakar pointed out that private sector and academic institutions can provide the expertise, resources and data sets needed for the government to accelerate AI use, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The OSTP event was organized as a “vision conference” to present the magnitude of AI use possibilities still ahead of the government’s initial successes in adopting the technology, Prabhakar said. Each advance in the government’s AI use opens further private sector support possibilities in such areas as the ethical deployment of the technology and ensuring that its algorithms are unbiased, she added.

During the event, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo cited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  AI-powered weather models as a stepping stone to create AI weather forecasting systems on the neighborhood level. Other new AI frontiers highlighted in the OTSP event include AI-powered drug research and development to accelerate approval for new medications.