The appearance of AI in public sector, government, and education platforms stirs up a lot of questions and possibilities. These are areas where cloud security, data integrity, and access are all a top priority.How can agencies in the public sector that wish to embrace the realm of possibilities that artificial intelligence represents ensure that AI in public sector solutions are safe, cost-effective, and drive the desired results? In this blog, we’re talking to one of SADA’s most trusted public sector and education experts, Strategic Partnerships Director Amanda Brown, about how to approach deployments of this promising technology in a way that best serves students, administrators, and constituents.
Generative AI has made a big splash in a number of industries, but education and the public sector come with a unique set of regulatory and cultural challenges to adoption. How do you think organizations dedicated to learning and the public good are adapting to generative AI?
The most visible impact we’ve seen from public sector artificial intelligence so far has been in education. While we may all end up working in different industries–tech, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and so on–every one of us shares the experience of sitting in a classroom with an essay that’s due tomorrow hanging over our head. Students–particularly college students–are at the vanguard of how AI is going to be adopted and implemented in our culture, and how the practices that they adopt in classrooms are going to migrate into their careers.
Another thing we all have in common? We belong to societies where we all depend on public institutions and government services. GenAI for the public sector should align with the core purposes of these institutions to ensure that citizens are served in an efficient, effective manner.
The biggest question surrounding GenAI and the public sector is how AI systems can make the workings of government more efficient, less expensive, and more effective for everyday people. It’s about leveraging AI to optimize and streamline some of the functions of maintaining a civil society, from the federal government to the local level.
We have an opportunity right now to define how to develop AI in public sector and education contexts. I think the most promising position to take is that AI provides a more diverse population of students and administrators with greater access to resources and knowledge. There are ethical considerations, to be sure, when using natural language processing in an educational context, and it’s vitally important that AI strategies are guided by principles of inclusion, fairness, and privacy.
We’re past the initial period when students turned to GenAI and asked, “Write this essay for me.” As students and professionals within the EDU space become more familiar with these tools, they’re uncovering entirely new modalities of learning. The administrators who are paying attention to what’s going on with AI in classrooms are filtering these advances through the question of how to improve access to knowledge, how to create more equitable learning opportunities, and how to align AI with learning outcomes. That’s what’s exciting about AI for education.
Education is where GenAI has arguably gotten the most headline-grabbing attention. What can GenAI do in an education setting, beyond compiling research answers and creating syllabi?
Well, let’s broaden our scope beyond just education to include government agencies. The true power of GenAI lies in its capacity to draw insights from immense volumes of data and provide easy-to-understand information to government agencies, the public, students, and administrators.
When you train an AI model on a good set of data, it can help elevate and illuminate patterns, opportunities, and trends in the data that you might have missed. This represents an advancement in the way people learn, which both holds a lot of promise and raises a lot of questions. Whether it’s learning how to assist urban planning with the data generated by traffic signals or how efficiently disability benefits are processed, AI in the public sector can make a positive difference.
With secure and properly implemented GenAI, government agencies can make constituent services more responsive while alleviating the workload of their staff. This helps organizations that are tasked with serving the public become more adaptive to their communities and be more responsive to their needs. Now, apply this responsiveness to the needs of a classroom. SADA is working with a number of customers who are still very early in the process of integrating GenAI to lesson plans and learning outcomes. Bringing curious and inquisitive minds together to tackle the big questions that GenAI is raising is what classrooms are designed for!
Data security is obviously critically important to maintaining our trust in public institutions. How can public sector organizations use generative AI in a way that ensures the safety and security of data?
First, consider that AI solutions don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re part of a larger cloud platform. Since AI solutions like Gemini for Workspace and Vertex AI are built into Google Cloud from the start, that means security is already accounted for.
There’s a reason why so many public institutions, government agencies, and universities turn to Google Cloud to ensure that their data remains secure–industry-leading security practices have been developed and tested over time. Data generated by government agencies require the highest levels of security, and that same level of vigilance is applied to AI.
For example, enhanced cybersecurity with Gemini for SecOps, augmented with Mandiant, actively helps safeguard the public sector’s sensitive information against cyberattacks, while using data and AI to forecast potential cyber threats before they happen. On top of that, Google Cloud’s data-encrypted infrastructure means model gardens are vetted for end-to-end security.
Another example of security and AI in action with Google Cloud is the 24/7 monitoring you get with AI-powered Gmail, which safeguards against 99.9% of spam, phishing attempts, and malware.
Do you have any examples of innovative use cases for generative AI in education or the public sector?
Absolutely. Here are just a few, with more developing all the time:
- With advanced analytics, machine learning services, and APIs, researchers can transform data into valuable insights quicker and more easily, moving from bold ideas to big discoveries. Google’s Notebook LM is one example of how multimodal functionality–like translating PDFs into a podcast–is helping us absorb more information, faster.
- AI helps users find scholarly literature across many sources and disciplines. It can be used to search for documents such as articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions from sources like academic publishers, universities, professional societies, and online repositories.
- Gemini for Workspace brings together the power of Gemini with the collaboration and productivity benefits of Workspace, embedding generative AI into the tools you’re already using every day. Whether it’s in Docs to create a job description, in Gmail to summarize a long email thread, in Sheets to create an agenda for an upcoming professional development session, or Meet to take notes for you during a meeting, Gemini for Workspace meets you where you’re already doing your work.
The US Air Force used Vertex AI to overhaul their manual process by building new GenAI app-stacks to streamline workloads from hours to minutes.
Let’s say I’m an administrator at a large public university and I’m responsible for allocating the school’s technology budget. I want to make sure we’re not left behind with generative AI. What is the most impactful investment I can make in GenAI?
Google Workspace for Education Plus is ready instantly, and provides a lot of value right out of the gate. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, Drive–it’s all ready to go for your students and administration and doesn’t require them to download any apps. And it comes with Gemini AI. Be sure to check out SADA’s education technology solutions.
Google Workspace is already an easy sell for the current generation of college students. SADA conducted a survey in which we found that 75% of university students prefer Google Workspace as their productivity suite of choice. The end users you want to reach are already familiar with this trusted platform, and adopting new AI capabilities is a very easy next step.
What are some rote tasks common in education and the public sector that you think will be more efficiently handled by AI?
There are a lot of ways that AI can make serving communities and supporting learning easier. Here are just a few:
- Better bots and AI agents benefit live human agents by automatically providing answers to constituent questions on everything from infrastructure projects to public services to traffic management.
- AI can translate written communications into multiple languages to improve information accessibility and equity for non-English speakers, in just a few seconds.
- AI within Google Forms allows for rapid form building, smarter analysis, insightful predictions, refined interactivity, quiz generation, and document conversion.
Walk me through how SADA works with a typical government organization or educational institution. What kinds of questions or issues are front of mind at the beginning of such an engagement?
As with every engagement with SADA, we always want to start from a place of understanding your unique organization’s goals, challenges, and regulatory landscape. That’s especially true for education and the public sector.
How will AI fit into your current technology stack? How can we ensure that it is deployed in a secure manner? Who needs to have access? What regulatory framework are you operating within when it comes to storing and moving data? How can we make sure that deployment of AI within your organization supports your goals and leads to the outcomes you’re looking to achieve?
These are just a few of the types of questions we ask when we’re working with public sector leaders in government and education, where it is vitally important to uphold the integrity of data and protect privacy.
What does a successful deployment of generative AI look like, from your perspective? What problems does GenAI solve and what opportunities does it create?
A successful deployment should equip staff with easier access to information and simplify collaboration. AI should make learning more accessible and ease the burden on staff with better workflows. Tools should empower public employees and administrators to evolve the way the government and education institutions serve students and citizens and ultimately lead to cost savings.
Yes, the generative AI tools that are now available to us are incredibly impressive, but they must always be put in service of making life easier and learning more engaging. At SADA, we’re committed to working alongside organizations that are doing this most necessary work, to expand opportunities.
Get started with AI for your organization
Whether you’re working in government agencies looking to elevate your constituent services or operating within an education organization, the time is right to embrace AI solutions to improve outcomes. Contact our AI experts today to schedule a discovery call about all the ways AI can help you achieve your organization’s goals.
