The General Services Administration (GSA) is making strides in advancing the three pillars of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), with Administrator Robin Carnahan saying this week that doubling down on efforts to recruit AI talent into the Federal government is “paying off.”
During her keynote address at the Workday Federal Forum event in Washington on May 22, Carnahan said the Federal government has seen 2,500 applications for AI careers, and has plans to announce a “new team in the next couple of weeks.”
The GSA head noted how the agency is leading in the Biden-Harris administration’s three PMA priority areas: workforce; customer experience; and business of government.
Apart from recruiting fresh AI talent, Carnahan said during the Workday Federal Forum that GSA is also looking to upskill its acquisition workforce.
“We want to make sure they understand the specialized needs of the computing infrastructure and AI,” Carnahan said. “We know we need to be more strategic in our buying and that is our intention – to figure out ways to be better buyers.”
In the customer experience pillar, Carnahan said that GSA is working to leverage survey information and feedback forms to improve government websites.
“If you think about customer service and customer experience and how you get better, you have to iterate, you have to hear from your customers, and you have to change,” she said. “Our team has come up with something called Gov CX Analyzer … it is an incredible open source tool that uses AI features, but it gives us insights about who’s actually using the website.”
“This is a way to go from a few thousand people filling out a survey to actually knowing and seeing how people are interacting with your site,” Carnahan said. “It just completely unlocks the potential to know how you can better serve your customers, where the friction points are, and how you can improve it.”
Carnahan ended her keynote speech with a plea to industry: “We need you to understand that we’re thinking about this differently and be ready to meet us in that new place.”
She also gave one piece of advice to government: “You need to understand that there is no technology that is coming to save you.”
“You need people who are talented and skilled, who can apply that technology. So, nothing’s going to come save the day. You’ve got to put the talent and the team and work in,” Carnahan said. “That means we need to be collaborating with each other and learning from each other’s experience and not reinventing the wheel all the time. If someone at another agency is doing the thing, let’s figure out how to scale and use that.”
One tool that she pointed to is the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). Currently, GSA’s TMF has an open call for AI proposals.
“I would encourage all of you to think about [TMF] as a tool and resource,” Carnahan said. “We have a call out right now for AI-related proposals. So, if you have anything that’s floating around your agency that looks like AI that you’d like some funding for, come to the TMF proposal. We can help you out.”
