Could AI lead to better government project delivery?

“We are all talking about AI and how it will change the world, and it will. It already is.”

The idea comes from the man who used to head up all of the US Federal Government IT in the Obama White House, Vivek Kundra.

“The breakthrough over the next 10 years – and I know it sounds like a buzzword, but it’s Artificial Intelligence… I think you are going to see the biggest transformation in technology, as big as when you think about what happened with the rise of Internet and networking. There was just an explosion – that is the future of AI in my mind.”

Speaking at the Cloud Security Alliance Federal Summit in Washington this week, Kundra predicted that use of Artificial Intelligence could have a range of positive outcomes for the US – including, perhaps surprisingly, fewer tech project screw-ups, as applying its power to the government’s many raw data sets could help feds reach stronger implementation around various IT projects.

Other use cases he told his audience about included how applying the nascent tech to health clinic data could help predict the performance of physicians and outcomes of the clinic, added Kundra – the first ever Uncle Sam CIO, who left after 2.5 years in post in 2011 after implementing efficiency programmes that are reckoned to have saved the American taxpayer $3bn.

And while there remain genuinely concerning issues about bias and ethics in AI, Kundra remains confident that the US government is set to harness the technology for good:

“The federal government and the innovators of Federal agencies are going to show us the way – and in many cases, we are already seeing that.”