AI in the public sector

Full transcript below

I'm Chris McPhee and I am Raftelis's CTO. I've been with the firm for 13 years at this point focusing on software development and data analysis, and I've been leaning into AI over the past year and a half. This is a really interesting technology, and we've been speaking with a number of utility GMs over the past two months and learning their perspectives. I think what we've been learning is that there's a lot of opportunity to improve on communications and engagement with customers.

Generative AI is a really powerful technology to work with language, and they've been leaning into focusing on how they deliver communications to their staff as well as to the customer base. A lot of different utilities are focusing on customer service as the entry point for generative AI because it does do well with phone interactions, email interactions, and things like that. And I think they're starting to explore some alternatives with being able to do operational work as well.

Obviously, AI has been around for decades now with machine learning, but I think folks are really starting to explore generative AI at this point. And Raftelis is starting to think about how we can assist the public sector client base with thinking about governance, thinking about data security and privacy, and some of the other concerns that they've been expressing during their interviews. So, we've been trying to come up with a good framework on how to advise our clients. We've had these really wonderful conversations and, you know, hearing about all the pain points and desires that they have for AI, and we're hoping to take that information and turn it into something where we can help clients with an AI use policy or other materials that they need to develop.

So in the age of AI, I know a lot of people have been reading the legacy media, listening to things online. There's been a lot of concern about jobs and other impacts of AI. I think what's going to be really important in the near term is focusing on the people element of it—of how do we use these tools to augment ourselves, make ourselves better, improve the level of service that we provide our customers and our clients.

And if we can focus on the people part of things and how we connect and how we engage with one another, I think that is where we build trust and where we continue those relationships. And that's going to be a big important thing to focus on besides retaining our judgment and our capabilities of recognizing nuance, recognizing when AI gives us information that's not correct, and be able to manage that and correct it.

I think those are going to be the key skills in terms of how organizations can support their staff. They can find the champions who understand AI, form teams around those champions to communicate how the technology can be used, and how it's going to help people most.