Hosted by Avi Bender, Managing Director of Bender Advisory Services LLC. Avi was formerly the Director of NTIS US Department of Commerce, the first CTO of the US Census Bureau, and the Director for Enterprise Architecture at the IRS
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.