The fourth-largest U.S. state by area — a state where almost half of the population is rural — has deployed a new Community Planning Platform from Snowflake, an AI data cloud tech provider for the public sector.
According to the company and state officials, that has led to at least $1.25 million in unlocked federal funding and has reduced planning work by more than half.
Those are nothing less than vital achievements for Montana, Adam Carpenter, the state’s chief data officer, told Government Technology.
“In a state like ours, nearly every service we provide touches a rural community,” he said via email. “It’s a singular, connected ecosystem, and any service the state provides must serve everyone.”
The state hired Snowflake in 2022 to improve data storage and analysis for several projects, he said. Now entire “agency footprints” are on Snowflake, with 18 active cross-agency data shares and 48 more scheduled.
As the state uses the tech to improve rural services, it is also planning what a company spokesperson called “an integrated justice data warehouse, an education-to-workforce ecosystem and AI-powered transparency tools that have already cut public records processing time nearly in half.”
The state has used Snowflake to digitize some 9.2 million pages of child support documents — a figure that underscores the potential and wide use of those data services as more public agencies embrace the fresh technology.
“The main focus has been on eliminating data silos — different agencies maintained independent systems, making statewide analyses more difficult,” said Carpenter. “A shared data environment has enabled the integration of information from multiple sources to support more consistent reporting across areas such as public health and justice.”
Such work reduces manual data preparation, freeing up resources, and also helps the state more efficiently fulfill records requests from the public, he said.
Not only that, but the deployments have shown state leaders the importance of flexibility. As Carpenter put it, “not having to think about which feature I need to enable or which tool I need to reach for reduces the friction of any process.”
For the rest of the year, Snowflake anticipates that much of its growth will come from “deeper adoption” of the company’s tools by states as leaders become more aware of the power of AI-backed data management, according to Jennifer Chronis, the company’s vice president for U.S. public sector.
“Agencies are exploring how AI can support areas such as fraud detection, financial oversight, emergency response and improving the overall citizen experience,” she told Government Technology. “What we’re hearing consistently is that governments want to pursue AI thoughtfully with strong governance and security at the core.”
Back in Montana, state leaders will keep building the government’s data management infrastructure, Carpenter said, with particular focus on such areas as public health, workforce, revenue and justice.
“Montana is focused on ensuring communities across regions have equitable access to services and opportunities,” he said. “Data integration makes it easier to compare regions across measures such as workforce participation, economic activity and program reach.”
