AI Advances and Government Impact
By Simon Tam, Senior Manager of Strategy and Analytics, Deloitte & Touche, LLP
Advances in generative AI (GenAI) are coming at us quickly. Understanding how both the public and private sectors can utilize AI tools and GenAI models, can be confusing. Fortunately, those of us in Columbus in early February had the chance to hear my colleague Jillian Wanner give the keynote at the OhioX State of Tech Summit, where she focused on GenAI developments, challenges and strategies for implementation.
Jillian’s intriguing talk also coincided with and drew from our company’s annual State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report, a survey of nearly 2,800 business and IT leaders. Jillian’s remarks and the survey results — alongside Deloitte’s own GenAI work here in Ohio and nationally — help paint a picture of what state agencies can achieve with strategic and trustworthy GenAI implementation.
Let’s start with the challenges, which in many ways are tied to the excitement around this technology. As Jillian pointed out, the hype today is mostly about the “business of AI.”
Lasting value and impact, however, will come when true “AI for business” arrives — where we really begin to see the ROI. That’s also approaching quickly, but our survey found the biggest challenge so far is around user adoption. In fact, fewer than 40% of workers even have access to AI tools on the job, and there is still some understandable employee resistance to the idea.
Though less than 30% of AI projects have reached implementation, our survey found there is actually quite a bit of optimism and plenty of opportunity for widespread AI implementation. I share that optimism and believe 2025 will be the year that we start to see demonstrably more impact and ROI from GenAI.
In the public sector, we’ll likely see it in areas where AI can help enhance worker productivity and improve the delivery of constituent services. For example, we’ve implemented GenAI solutions in several states to help caseworkers and contact center employees navigate and answer complex policy questions in real time. Simply type a question into the application, and our NextGen Policy Engine explores hundreds or even thousands of pages of regulations to deliver a quick and accurate answer.
AI can also improve the quality of data analytics by weeding out unnecessary information and enhancing decision making. Deloitte was proud to support the State of Ohio in implementing RegExplorer, our sophisticated AI tool that has helped review the state’s administrative code to find and eliminate or streamline regulatory language.
From these and dozens of other state and federal AI projects, we’ve learned you can’t just buy and bolt new technology on to old processes. Successful organizations strategically approach GenAI, target the business use cases that make the most sense, utilize change management to train employees, and work to increase adoption as these projects scale across the enterprise.
We’ve also learned how important it is to put humans at the core of these transformative technical innovations. What I mean by that: at heart, a business task might be replaceable, but the worker’s skill, knowledge and experience is not. Both are needed to help organizations truly understand the user experience and realize the ROI.
There’s a lot to comb through when considering how to implement GenAI solutions in the public sector. If you’d like to learn more about a strategic approach to GenAI, please check out Deloitte’s latest GenAI report, or reach out to me directly .