Artificial intelligence (AI) relies on vast quantities of data to generate accurate outcomes — and that’s an obstacle for many public-sector agencies interested in AI technology. It’s not only that data grows exponentially, it’s that society produces more and more types to collect and analyze, said Rich Barlowe, Principal Technologist with Pure Storage, a company that stores, manages and protects data.
There are real hazards to getting it wrong: loss of public trust, legal ramifications, bad decision-making, and missed opportunities, he said. And poor data management can undermine AI innovations.
So how can agencies — inundated by masses of data — make sense of what they have and harness what AI offers?
3 Fundamental Needs
To begin, agencies need enough data to feed each AI model, because AI algorithms require huge amounts of data, generated over time, in order to produce useful outcomes, Barlowe said. Second, agencies must provide AI tools with the right kind of data and, third, they must use models tailored to the agency’s specific need.
Organizations typically cherry pick the data they want and delete the rest, said Barlowe, but that leaves AI tools with relatively small data repositories to draw from. “In an AI world, you keep all of your data,” he explained. “You don’t throw it out, because you don’t know what the model’s going to need a year from now, five years from now.”
By investing in data management strategies today, agencies can begin securely saving all the data they need. Pure Storage can help, Barlowe said: “We have some really cool ways of attacking the problem.”
Be Flexible
AI is forward-thinking; legacy thought embraces the past. So when using AI, agencies must be willing to abandon processes launched in the 1980s, for example, and be mentally and organizationally flexible. “What works this year might be foolish next year,” Barlowe said. In other words, tie yourself to the outcome your agency wants, not to a specific technology or model.
“I’ve seen more AI projects buried by inflexibility than anything else,” he noted. “It’s not money, it’s not technology, it’s literally ‘well, we can’t do that.’”
Outdated thinking afflicts the private sector also, but government is different: “In the public sector, the repercussions are bigger,” Barlowe said. “You’re serving the community, the taxpayer and your constituents.”
Have an AI Strategy
The success of any IT project largely depends on planning, and artificial intelligence is no different. Agencies need an overarching AI strategy that answers four questions, he said:
- What are your ethics and biases?
- What are your legal frameworks?
- How will you keep data private?
- What is your ultimate objective?
Such a four-pronged method will inform an agency’s software and hardware purchases, data modeling, staff hires and partnership decisions, Barlowe said. It will help you understand the environment you’re dealing with, including compliance and other requirements. And a good AI strategy relates to cybersecurity. After all, “who wants to be on the front page of the paper?” he asked.
Maximizing Data Management
AI may be complicated, but data management doesn’t need to be. An effective approach is free from disruptive updates and technical debt, Barlowe said. For instance, Pure Storage’s Evergreen solutions replace an agency’s system every three years, so it runs faster with no transitional downtime. An AI model “takes a long time to churn through all the data,” he said, and “downtime is a huge deal.”
A good data platform is efficient and flash-based, which conserves energy, space and time. It also guards against ransomware and other attacks by using solutions such as Pure Storage’s SafeMode backup technology, said Barlowe.
“A lot of AI projects are just getting off the ground now,” he said. “But if you look at the promise of them, what they’re going to deliver is accelerated, more intelligent, less biased decision-making” — for agencies that prepared.
For more of Richard Barlowe’s insights during the recent GovLoop virtual summit — “How AI and Automation Can Elevate Your Agency” — click HERE.
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