“I named Nikhil Deshpande my chief AI officer a year and a half ago, but AI is not just his job,” she said at the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) Midyear Conference in April.
That responsibility extends beyond the C-suite of the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA). Thomas said that training is essential to AI governance, making sure that staff at all levels know how to use the tools available and use them properly.
She also pointed to the rise of agentic AI, and how that can enable staff to work more efficiently if they know how to create AI tools tailored to their own needs. By way of example, Thomas said GTA’s admin recently built their own AI agent to help with the agency’s travel planning.
“Any role can change within state government as it relates to AI,” she said.
Video Transcript:
Well, in any state, AI is not an individual sport. It's a team sport. I named Nikhil Deshpande my chief AI officer a year and a half ago, but AI is not just his job. It's my job. It's my security officer's job, my legal team's job, my CTO's job. It's our job to make sure we understand the AI landscape, how we need to train, what tools we need to use. It's everybody's job to make sure they understand, you know, how it can help them to do their jobs easier.
I think AI literacy is the most critical characteristic of AI governance. Making sure that folks know how to use these tools, making sure they know which use cases to categorize as low, medium and high, which we do, and making sure they know what data to use. Only to use the data they need to use for that specific use case. So training them on AI, the tools, makes responsible use much better. Because when they're able to use the tools responsibly, then we don't have to worry about issues coming out.
How are you exploring AI agents to supplement state IT work?
With these tools you can build agents quickly now. And so what I'm trying to get my team to do now is, let's make sure we understand what's being built, make sure we understand what level they're, they're being built to, make sure we understand what they have access to.
'Cause you can't give these agents access to everything. So wrapping our hands around that, getting a tool to make sure we can look at that on a daily basis throughout state government to make sure we know what these agents are doing. There's a lot of possibilities in using agents. There's also a lot of risk in using agents.
