Emerging Tech

Artificial intelligence is helping the Army keep its Stryker armored vehicles in fighting shape.

Army officials are using IBMs Watson AI system in combination with onboard sensor data, repair manuals and 15 years of maintenance data to predict mechanical problems before they happen. IBM and the Armys Redstone Arsenal post in Alabama demonstrated Watsons abilities on 350 Stryker vehicles during a field test that began in mid-2016.

The Army is now reviewing the results of that test to evaluate Watsons ability to assist human mechanics, and the early insights are encouraging.

The Watson AI enabled the pilot programs leaders to create the equivalent of a personalized medicine plan for each of the vehicles tested, said Sam Gordy, general manager of IBM U.S. Federal. Watson was able to tell mechanics that you need to go replace this [part] now because if you dont, its going to break when this vehicle is out on patrol, he added.

The Army is one of a handful of early adopters in the federal government, and several other agencies are looking into using AI, machine learning and related technologies. AI experts cite dozens of potential government uses, including cognitive chatbots that answer common questions from the public and complex AIs that search for patterns that could signal Medicaid fraud, tax cheating or criminal activity.

There are, for a lack of a better number, a gazillion sweet spots for AI in government, said Daniel Enthoven, business development manager at Domino Data Lab, a vendor of AI and data science collaboration tools.

Still, many agencies will need to answer some difficult questions before they embrace AI, machine learning and autonomous systems. For instance, how will the agencies audit decisions made by intelligent systems? How will they gather data from often disparate sources to fuel intelligent decisions? And how will agencies manage their employees when AI systems take over tasks previously performed by humans?

Intelligence agencies are using Watson to comb through piles of data and provide predictive analysis, and the Census Bureau is considering using the supercomputer-powered AI as a first-line call center that would answer peoples questions about the 2020 census, Gordy said.

A Census Bureau spokesperson added that the AI virtual assistant could improve response times and enhance caller interactions.

Using AI should save the bureau money because you have a computer doing this instead of people, Gordy said. And if trained correctly, the system will provide more accurate answers than a group of call-center workers could.

You train Watson once, and it understands everything, he said. Youre getting a very consistent answer, time after time after time.

For many agencies, however, its still early in the AI adoption cycle. Use of the technology is very, very nascent in government, said William Eggers, executive director of Deloittes Center for Government Insights and co-author of a recent study on AI in government. If it was a nine-inning [baseball] game, were probably in the first inning right now.

He added that over the next couple of years, agencies can expect to see AI-like functionality being incorporated into the software products marketed to them.

The first step for many civilian agencies appears to be using AI as a chatbot or telephone agent. Daniel Castro, vice president of theInformation Technology and Innovation Foundation, said intelligent agents should be able to answer about 90 percent of the questions agencies receive, and the people asking those questions arent likely to miss having a human response.

Its not like people are expecting to know their IRS agents when they call them up with a question, he said.

The General Services Administrations Emerging Citizen Technology program launched an open-source pilot project in April to help federal agencies make their information available to intelligent personal assistants such as Amazons Alexa, Googles Assistant and Microsofts Cortana. More than two dozen agencies including the departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Transportation are participating.

Many vendors and other technology experts see huge opportunities for AI inside and outside government. In June, an IDC study sponsored by Salesforce predicted that AI adoption will ramp up quickly in the next four years. AI-powered customer relationship management activities will add $1.1 trillion to business revenue and create more than 800,000 jobs from 2017 to 2021, the study states.

In the federal government, using AI to automate tasks now performed by employees would save at least 96.7 million working hours a year, a cost savings of $3.3 billion, according to the Deloitte study. Based on the high end of Deloittes estimates, AI adoption could save as many as 1.2 billion working hours and $41.1 billion every year.

AI-based applications can reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans cant easily do on our own, such as sifting through millions of documents in real time for the most relevant content, the report states.

Although some might fear a robot takeover, Eggers said federal workers should not worry about their jobs in the near term. Although theres likely to be pressure from lawmakers to use AI to reduce the governments headcount, agencies should look at AI as a way to supplement employees work and allow them to focus on more creative and difficult tasks, he added.

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Is government ready for AI? - FCW.com