How the Trust Gap Could Affect AI Modernization and What Leaders Should Do About It

Welcome today everyone. We’re really excited about this webinar. It’s one that we’ve really been looking forward to and looking forward to welcoming our two guests to talk about how AI is impacting modernization in state and local governments. This is a topic where we’re speaking with almost every single one of our clients about and then the conversation today looking forward to exploring how they’re thinking about it, what they’ve seen work, what challenges they’ve had, and how they think that we can continue to leverage this technology even more going forward. Before we get kicked off today, just a couple of quick housekeeping points. A link to the webinar will be sent out with the recording. All of your microphones have been muted due to the size of the webinar and we’re going to ask you to use the Q&A function to ask any questions and we’ll make sure we follow up with those. Today we’re really excited to welcome our two panelists to the webinar. First we have Alberto Gonzalez from the state of Idaho.

Thanks Tom. Gonalos, the state CIO for the state of Idaho. Thank you.

Great. And next we have Rachel Stern from Govk Ventures.
Hi there. Rachel Stern, founder and managing partner of GVtech Ventures.
You know, I think thinking about this webinar and you know, the conversation, it’s always amazing to me almost every single CIO conversation I have, whether that’s on the local side or the state side, it really the question has to come up these days around AI, what’s the usage, how is it being thought about, you know, what are people doing? And I think you know today for us really excited to hear your both points of view about what you’re seeing out in the ecosystem and how it’s you know going to impact constituents hopefully for the better. Certainly there’s a lot of challenges and a lot of thoughts running around but really looking forward to getting both your thoughts on the topic. So maybe we’ll just jump right in. You know I think as we think about the impact that AI has a lot of times it comes from the constituent experience and how they’re going to experience it but I know at least in the lot of conversations I have there’s also a lot of thoughts about how it’s going to impact employees on the state and local side so maybe Alberto I’ll start with you love to hear about you know how are you thinking about how government agencies should prepare their teams and their processes their systems for what seems to be a coming wave

I love the question. I think first and foremost, I think this has brought to the forefront that data hygiene is really important. So standard operating procedures, you know, all the statutes, all the rules are really important because that’s what’s going to feed the AI and citizens when they call government or when they go online for government, they want accurate answers. They want accurate decisions and they want to be able to interact with us in a way that makes a lot of sense. And I think we have a responsibility to make sure that we have our ducks in a row. Honestly, like the data hygiene and the standard operating procedure hygiene to me is like at the forefront of making this a successful endeavor moving forward.
Certainly. And maybe Rachel I’d love to hear as you think about, you know, all the conversations you have in your experience. Have you encountered a lot of resistance? I know we hear about that a lot of people being worried about kind of where this is headed.

Yeah, I mean I’ve been an investor in the space for 15 years entirely focused on state and local gov tech and I’m sure we’ve all lived through this particularly Alberto. There’s sort of been three waves of innovation that I’ve seen. There’s sort of the cloud adoption era of 2011 to 2014 and then we had mass digitization of processes in the pandemic and now we’ve got this really interesting inflection of Doge and AI creating this top down pressure on state and local governments to sort of innovate very very quickly without additional resources and I think that the fear of course for all of us in every sector is that AI comes in and takes jobs. But I think more realistically, at least for state and local government, I think AI helps solve for the barbell problem. You’ve got these departments that are one-man bands who have been holding together systems that frankly should have been retired years ago. That are completely customized and completely unwieldy and are leaving a system or a set of services very very vulnerable. And then you’ve got the other side of the equation which is departments that are 10 people who are all doing paper super intensive manual repetitive processes. And both of those would benefit from one human in the loop with great technology and then a reallocation of those resources. So when I’ve been talking to state and local governments, it has there’s of course that fear, but I think actually the reality is that people aren’t losing jobs. They’re just getting spread out across a lot of different systems in a much more efficient, much more effective way with technology as their sidekick to help them do the repetitive processes that typically take them hours or days or weeks. The risk of that is that they end up with the kinds of cases that are the hardest to manage, right? You take away the really easy use cases and then you just load people’s desks with the really complicated, heart-rending services. And so keeping employee satisfaction going, I think will be a really crucial part to this adoption. But generally I think about it as really just an evening out across the spectrum of services.

Certainly. And Alberto, I’m sure you’re living and breathing this every day, but I, you know, I love Rachel that articulation, but the throwing those barbells, I’m sure you’re living with this. How’s that manifesting itself for you and your teams?
First of all, my god, could you have said it any better? So, that was really good. You know, I’ve been all about automation this whole time before AI because to me, machine learning, I always talk about the in Idaho, we reduce the DMV traffic by 40%. Which is insane, right? Like, it’s insane that you can go to the DMV in Idaho. I know it’s a small state, but if you go to Boise, it’s still like about a million people down here in this area. and you don’t have to wait. That’s insane citizen engagement, right? So to me it always feels like AI is just a gamechanger that it will accelerate some of those services and I feel like there’s such mundane tasks that are you know data entry paper processing call center type stuff or even onboarding people that the lowhanging fruit I’m not even talking about the complex AI stuff that we can do which I have a few examples to share with you as we go along but to me it just feels like we need leaders that are willing to embrace the idea of making citizen engagement much better to make us more responsible. We’re a red state, so we’re never going to grow. So in the DMV, we’ve had the same number of FTE for 20 years, but state of Idaho, Google it if you’d like or AI it, you know, look it up on Gemini or wherever. It’s grown faster than most states. Like I think it’s been Utah, Florida, and Idaho have been the three fastest growing states. We have not changed the number of people we’ve had because automation can help like technology is a complete gamechanger to how we do business processing and citizen engagement. So to me I feel like we have a real responsibility to sort of be evangelists be also the ones that warn people about the dangers of AI because there are some dangers when it comes to AI. But I think more than anything, if we can guide them through the process and get people excited about automating the way government does work, making the citizen experience better, and being responsible with taxpayer dollars, I think we have such a great opportunity right now with AI.

Well, certainly couldn’t agree more with that. I guess as you think about that, is there anything you and your leaders have done specifically to help reduce any of the anxiety, especially from some of the workforce around, you know, at least what we hear again is a lot of times people are somewhat reticent around it just because they don’t understand, you know, how it’s going to change and especially if you end up in a world where, as Rachel said, you end up with all the hardest things. You know, I think sometimes people a don’t even understand what it is and b trying to figure out, you know, what does it mean for them? if you guys done anything to help people really understand, you know, if done correctly, like this should be a real empowerer for you versus a threat.

So, true story. I presented to the AI committee legislature AI committee last December. And while I was presenting, I got a text from the HR director. He said, “Did you seriously just tell them we’re going to be doing a reduction in force because of AI?” And I said, “That’s not what I said.” But I think it sounded that way. And I think a lot of people are scared as hell about AI taking over their jobs. But the truth is when we reduce 40% of the walking traffic through machine learning a couple of years ago, we didn’t lose jobs. What we forced them to do is think about how to repurpose the employees that were there, how to like cross functionalize them to do other work, upskill them to do other things. And through attrition, yes, there was probably a reduction in force, but there was no layoffs. There was nothing like that. But I think that people started to think differently about you know if it’s my organization and I can automate development a little bit faster as vacancies come up and I don’t need appdev I don’t need application developers I don’t need software developers because all of a sudden AI is accelerating the way I do software development now I need people that are going to be doing deployment or network or cyber I can sort of move the pieces around to where the organization needs us but it’s not it has not been a layoff situation it’s been more of a augmenting the productivity of these areas and then rethinking when vacancies come up how we use those properly and I think it does scare a lot of people that it’s like this is going to take my job but in reality this is going to make you better as an employee it’s going to make you more productive

I think it forces oh I’m so sorry to interrupt you but I think it forces a certain flexibility that we historically haven’t expected really from anyone in any sector but particularly in the government where it’s like one guy who’s done the same thing for 25 years. It’s the same process. He’s the gatekeeper of it. And now we want and need and expect them to be able to play across processes and see the through line across all of their work. And I just think that shepherds in such an interesting era of government workers and work itself where you’re not just like rubber stamping things all day, eight hours a day, 5 days a week, but you’re actually getting to do some thought leadership and some anticipatory work and some strategic work in a way that I don’t think we necessarily wanted or needed before.

Yeah. And I know Alber, you guys have done so much work on this, you’re probably on the far end of the spectrum to the positive, but you know, I think we certainly have clients who are so inundated with request and the line is so long that they can’t even dig out of some of that. I think that’s also when we think about empowerment, a lot of it is, you know, how do you kind of get back in front of it, which I know you guys have done a fantastic job of, but you know, in some places where they’re multiple headcounts short and the lines around the corner. I think being able to get ahead of that wave will be certainly a hopefully a positive byproduct that comes out of this tech revolution. You know, I think maybe follow up on that as we think about as you’re implementing new AI, as you think about all the bits and parts that you have to put together. I think you guys both touched a little bit on the foundation and, you know, I think data process is a huge one. There’s a lot around governance and how, you know, which who has what access to what is a really important topic that I know a lot of people are wrestling with right now. Is there anything that you all have seen out there that you would think about for this audience? You know, these are the things we should be thinking about as we’re heading down this path. Maybe Rachel, I’ll start with you.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Alberto’s point about sort of data cleanliness and data readiness is really really important. And you know, so much of state and local government data is in filing cabinets that the risk is that decisions are being made with incomplete data sets. And to me that is where AI becomes dangerous where you are taking in sort of bits and pieces of the truth and then making pretty systemwide decisions. And so I think there’s this sort of inevitable growth process for states and cities where they are going to have to allocate very limited resources to but some resources to that data cleaning and digitization of documents and figuring out where all their PDFs are and across different systems. And I don’t think it has to be 100% in a perfect world of course it would be but it has to be complete enough that the system can teach itself to make really thoughtful decisions. Because the danger is that it certainly doesn’t. I see and I’ll be so curious what Bto has to say on this. There’s been an adoption I think of sort of these generalized AI tools chatbt perplexity Gemini because people understand it makes them more efficient. I think there has been a reluctance to adopt gov tech AI native companies for sort of the systems thinking and more of the day-to-day process work. And I think that’s a reluctance because we’re still waiting on sort of federal and state frameworks for what’s legal and what isn’t and no one wants to adopt something and fall in love with it and then suddenly lose access to it. But I do think in some ways it’s slowing down some of the adoption of really interesting gov tech specific work at sort of at the detriment of sort of more generalized efficiency across these systems that really aren’t meant for government. And so I’m excited to sort of see that transition I’m hoping over the next 12 to 18 months as some of these wonderful government workers say like I actually need something that’s specific for me.

Man, Rachel, I got to spend more time with you because I think you get it. I gotta tell you though, like I think it’s so funny because we unleash the general, we call them general productivity, you know, like what you’re talking about. Chad TBT, Gemini, Co-Pilot, which still scares me a little bit. It’s too quick to get into the data, but you know, we have a few of these there and even CL. So, like we have these four like general productivity, like we’re good with that. That means people are doing level one data type help me just be more efficient you know with what I do I think when we start looking at actual use cases the ones I get really excited about so it’s automation it’s getting like child welfare workers to determine what the permanency of a child looks like based on three years of case study can that help me if I do three years of case study in a containerized controlled LLM if I can tell you like only use this data in here, but use the power of AI and tell me like if I gave you this case with all these parameters and all these milestones, what would you recommend for permanency for a child in child buffer? What used to take many many hours is now taken less than like a minute because that’s what’s happening, right? That’s the kind of sort of power of AI that I think is just impactful. I think when we look at the paper processing at a DMV that’s getting a million registrations or a million you know millions of documents coming in through either email or the mail getting scanned and autopopulated into the system of record and as far as like just having someone spot check the accuracy of that because the accuracy is now up to like 95%.

It’s just amazing how you can take a lot of these tasks both the low-level stuff in processing data entry or determining the permanency of a child in foster care like the power of AI is really really significant as long as you’re controlling what’s feeding that decision-making matrix right so it’s really important like how you’re indexing this thing and so for me I get excited about it because again everything I’ve done through you know Medicaid through the health insurance exchange, the through the DMV and even what we do here. It’s really what can we automate? Why are we doing these things in these old ways? And so I get excited about AI because I think it’s a game changer. But for me, it feels like we need leaders to embrace it because that’s usually the biggest obstacle is leaders are like we’re not ready for that. Maybe talk to us in a year or two or three. And at that point it’s like what are you doing? Like what are you doing as a government leader not embracing this thing and looking at it from a you know safe like you got to be safe you got to be riskaverse you got to make sure that you got your house in order so we do this properly but let’s make your agency more productive and I think that’s where we’re coming from and our governor little for the state of Idaho has said do not overgovern this thing like don’t overcontrol it just give them guidance so our whole thing is guidance over governance and I think A lot of other states are like, “Oh, there’s a statute or there’s this rule or they’re governing us to do this.” By the way, the rules are not going to keep up with technology. So, to me, it feels like do this in a way that is like a lie and you know, constantly changing and pivoting and adjusting, but don’t make it a statute because that’s going to be outdated by the time you go into place. But that’s what I would say around this.

I just to build off of that, what I loved about what Alberta said was a bunch of things, but the ability for AI to be predictive and aggregate data across all of these systems is such an interesting use case. LA County a couple of years ago took thousands of data points to try to predict homelessness for people in their community because it was much much harder once people were homeless to get them back into the system rather than trying to anticipate right before they were about to become homeless and sort of have interventionist policies. And I think we have that ability across tremendous systems. The risk there of course is privacy concerns and the ability to you know identify people even though all those data points are anonymous. And I guess my push back on that which is a sort of unpopular opinion so come at me webinar people which is that like we are so comfortable giving away all of our data to anyone but the government. Like Tik Tok is building off of our brains and we are so nervous about government using it inefficiently, but we are happy to give it to social media. And I think that if there was a little bit more openness in terms of systems talking to each other and data becoming less siloed across different verticals and across different departments and constituents were asking for something like that, there would be this unbelievable sort of force multiplication across systems that allowed people to be tracked and have their services coordinated for much more impactful delivery. But there is a little bit of that trust building exercise that I think is the hard cell right now. And if we can get there, we’ll make our systems so much more efficient and effective.

And maybe one thing just to ripple back on is you think about I love the you know, guidance versus governance mantra. I might steal that one, but you know, I think one thing I’ve heard from a lot of especially more the agency head type people versus on the CIO IT side is, you know, a lot of times they’re not technology experts and so they’re trying to understand like how do I even embrace this not really understanding what’s going on here? And Alber just ask you is how do you guys think about giving some level of guidance there for people who are less familiar with it who are who want to embrace it? And I think to your point, like, you know, at least for me, one of the things I love about this space is everybody we work with is trying to do the right thing for their constituents, right? And that’s why they’re there. They could probably go do five other things, but they’re there because they want to do well, and they’re just trying to figure out how do I make sure I’m doing the right thing and don’t overstep my bounds or accidentally make a mistake with something that I really don’t necessarily understand.
No, it’s so funny. That’s such a good question because I’ve dealt with directors when we unleashed the framework. I say unleash because I’m like I just I had this dream that when we put out the framework and we allowed for these tools to be used that our doors would be just like we would be it would be like Black Friday, right? Like everyone’s coming in through the Target doors and we’re like trying to hold everybody back. That was not the case. Like there’s such a hesitation to even adopt some of these things because these directors, they’re not technologists. They’re great at, you know, natural resources. They’re great at health and human services. They’re great at labor corrections and state police work, but they don’t want to touch technology because they don’t know, they don’t know the possibilities. And we have some great directors that just have a vision of doing better. The director of commerce, actually the director of water resources, like there’s all these directors that are like, how can I make AI make our people more efficient? When I talk to those people, I get so the DMV person, the DMV director that replaced me, I always say she’s 2.0, know way better than I was when she was there. She’s so good and she’s coming up with all these different ideas. And so I think what we’re trying to do is do some awareness around sort of demystify the fear of AI and talk about the readiness for AI and talk about the possibilities and get them to think differently.

So we’ve been doing a lot of public speaking. We’ve been doing some highlighting of these things that people are doing and trying to create videos. In fact, we’re creating a video. We have a governor, the governor’s having all the directors come together in the middle of December. I’m like, I’m showing them what some of the agencies are doing with AI. So, the ones that aren’t doing it, we can shame them a little bit in a good way. It’s more encouragement than shame, you know? But it’s like, what are you doing? Like, how are you still doing manual processes or how are you still doing all these things? So we’re trying to just highlight it and kind of demystify the fears like there I guess there’s worries around data leakage, there’s worries around your employees misusing this, but here’s the way we can safeguard this and put some guard rails around how to do this the same way we did. Somebody told me that policy should drive technology and I said, “Oh man, I’m like pretty old, you know.” I said, I was around when the email got introduced. I said, we didn’t know the rules to email until like way later that we’re like, oh, you shouldn’t email that stuff. Also, with the internet, you probably shouldn’t download that stuff at work was a later thing, right? Like I think technology is way ahead of us. I said we’re three years behind on policy. So, let’s just do the best we can and try to provide some guidance to get people to adopt this amazing tool that’s becoming available for government to be better.

Totally agree. Sure. You know, I think one of the things that we’ve seen is a lot of leaning in and I think to your point, a lot of people are excited about the potential here and are trying to figure out how to use it to their advantage and drive it forward. I’d be curious as you all think about, you know, what’s the one or two things that you’ve seen out there that get you excited? Are there, you know, processes or services that you’ve seen that have been impacted because I think at least what we see is a lot of times people don’t necessarily want to be first, but once they see the potential and can see the real impact it can have on constituents, that gives them, you know, a little bit of the confidence to then go out and actually do it themselves. Is there anything that you’ve seen out there that’s gotten you really excited or gotten, you know, your peers really excited? Okay, Rachel.

Yeah, happy to speak to this. So, I think you know the lowest hanging fruit with AI are processes that are high volume, data intensive, frequently repeated. So case management, customer service and document processing and traffic management. I think all of that is really ripe for AI. I don’t think those are the most forwardthinking parts of AI, but I think they are the most useful right now. Which are just again this barbell of how do you reallocate resources and do things a little bit more efficiently. I think in the future AI will be an unbelievable thought partner for governments because it will be able to highlight mistakes made and opportunities made so that forward thinking whether it’s policy or systems or services can really have strong KPIs and have really strong outcomes in a way that there’s just no way we would have known had we not been able to aggregate all these data points. So I think right now it’s an efficiency metric and how can we sort of lower the human resource time across a lot of these systems and in the future it will be about how do we run a more efficient government and effective government and really track progress across a lot of different systems.

I totally agree like that’s so well said. I think right now there’s all this lowhanging fruit, but to me it I hate to say because I get so again my health insurance exchange. So I was we helped set up the affordable care act in Idaho was the only red state by the end of it and I felt like oh my god it blew my mind because there was no brick and mortar. You could do all those services online and there was no reason for you to go into a government office to do this thing. We built rules. We built, you know, verifications. We built determinations all based on like not AI but like machine learning, right? So to me it’s always been like why aren’t we automating? I agree. The low hanging fruit is data entry, it’s paper processing, it’s contacting that that’s all like lawmakers will love that from a costing perspective or at least from a growth stunting perspective like hey we don’t have to go over. What I get really excited about, I think, is like where are we making better decisions around how are we doing fraud detection better? How is our agriculture team doing better sort of research and analytics and predictability? Like how do we get really creative with this tool? I mean, if they’re figuring out vaccines and how to bring back wolves that are 10,000 year olds extinct, why are we like limiting ourselves to just data entry and paper processing? Like we got to really think about how government can be better. I think traffic being in transportation I think a lot of these corridors that are like high death rates. I think when we talk about traffic management I think when we think about again for us like we had this muscle problem over in our waters like how do we kill the stuff that’s killing our natural fisheries here in the rivers. I think the possibility of AI is significantly higher and I think we’re just stuck in this sort of entry level like how do we do drive-thru through an app, you know, like that’s we’re beyond that. Like we’ve got to get beyond that. Like yeah, at the very lowest level, we should be doing the mundane tasks with AI, but we should be thinking bigger about how government can benefit from AI. And I think that’s where I’m kind of stuck and hoping we can accelerate that.

Can I just add one more thing to that which is I think it’s such an exciting thing to hear leaders wanting to sort of see over the horizon. What I think that will mean is a different source of procurement. Because right now we only are able to ask for the things we know and the way that procurement is written or you know vendors are sought is like how do we do this system as we know it maybe a little bit more efficiently and I think that I would be interested and hopeful to see state and local government move more towards what the federal government is already doing particularly the DoD which is how do we think forward 30 years and think competitively? How do we maintain you know security? How do we maintain innovation? How do we stay you know forward thinking internally so that we can remain dominant globally and I think state and local government sometimes gets caught up in just the day-to-day administration of government. And what that means is that there is less of a procurement opportunity for just sort of the big ideas. And so I really hope that there’s a shift in the next, let’s just say 3 to 5 years of more open-ended procurement, maybe more RFQS or RFIs versus RFPs, or before the RFPs, so that state and local government is hearing ideas from vendors that they couldn’t have even considered or contemplated as a solution for the problem. So I hope

so it’s funny. I just met with a bunch of CIOS from the area. There were county city higher ed. So boyisey state you know blue turf people. So we were meeting today and what we were excited about was the consortiums like the NASA the omnas like get us Yes. And speaking of AI, you know, AI could really help with procurement, but I think that using these consortiums for procurement doesn’t create this sort of 18 to 24 month delay. It’s almost like I know what I want. It actually has a little bit of a, you know, a little bit more flexibility with it as far as, you know, what we’re trying to do. But I also think, you know, just think about pay it in general, like you guys are processing millions and millions of payments every year. And so what are those like what data are you using to help us figure out how people are doing business with us? Are they going online? Are they doing is it mobile? Is it like are they going in person to these county or city offices? Like there’s so much data there for us to use to make the experience better. How do we get people out of that physical brick and mortar which is my dream. I don’t ever want to go to a government sucks. That’s my dream. My a coming to any office when I was the DMV director I said nobody wants to come see us. Let’s figure out how to not get people to come see us. Right. And so nobody wants to go to government office. So how do we do that better? And I think using every available data to help us inform us and then to help us create predictability and forecasts and how do we do things better and leveraging the power of AI I think is where the power lies in the future for us in government.

Yeah. I mean maybe just tying up both those points. You know, I think because of some of the procurement rules and because people are still trying to understand the potential and even envision the bigger more impactful ways that they can leverage this. We’ve seen a lot of people who have been on the pilot front, right? And I think part of that is they are just trying to figure out like how do I get going? How do I get moving here? knowing that if you go through a big RP process, if I go through a big project timelining like those things in government, at least in my experience, can take a while, right? But so, but I want to impact things and I want to do it fast. Have you seen any places where people have been running pilots and any sort of learnings that you’ve seen where, you know, for the folks who are joining us today, you know, things that they can bring back and say, hey, if I’m going to get a pilot up and running fast, here’s something we should be thinking about.

I really like companies that play nice in the sandbox with other existing vendors. That is certainly from an investment point of view, but I think from a customer satisfaction point of view is like having to rip this is what cloud software and software as a service enabled this for the first time 15 years ago. But the idea that you don’t have to rip out existing systems that you can overlay best practices and innovative technology and not have to totally change everything. I think at least for these initial stages of AI adoption, the companies that are able to either do APIs with existing vendors or just take data that’s available and not have to go through a whole sort of customized backend across data sets are going to be the most successful and probably have the highest chance of success with pilots because it just means you can try them without having to sort of upend the whole cart.

So, I that’s really good, Rachel. I think that’s awesome. I think there’s a fear, at least what I’ve seen with a lot of our agencies, there’s a lot of companies that have seed money. I’m going to air quote that for you. If you have seed money, you know, green projects, whatever, that they want to do investments, but typically a lot of those investments are truly like, how do we lock you in, right? And I don’t like that practice at all. And so to me, what Rachel just said is let’s put together a few vendors and see if financially if we can actually make a difference like can we actually put together a solution that everybody gets to benefit from, right? Like the state gets a benefit from it or a county, municipality, whatever there. But what’s a real solution we’re trying to find? And don’t try to pigeon hole us into a solution that you’re still sort of in R&D mode. like let’s really look at like what’s actually possible right away. I can’t believe how many people went from zero AI services to like 1500 logos offering AI expertise, right? So to me it just feels like let’s be real about the capabilities that we have and the use cases that we’re trying to solve and the cost structure that’s there. I think from a procurement standpoint in Idaho, we feel really good. I feel like in Idaho the conversation lately is the consortiums are coming through and we’re avoiding even for an MMIS solution which is the Medicaid solution. We’re able to go through a consortium instead of an RFP. It’s kind of a big deal because the price tag for doing Medicaid is not cheap, right? So, if you’re able to go through one of these pre- sort of competed contracts through one of these consortiums, that’s amazing. It reduces the procurement time by a lot. But I think we need to find the right partners. We need to find trusted partners. We need to find trusted solutions. And I think that it will this may actually change the landscape of like the power players that stay and the power players that may not. I think it’s going to be about relationships and about true solutions.

It’s everyone playing nice in the sandbox both on the customer side and on the vendor side
for sure and you know and I think you know that trust component is something maybe just thinking about it from the other side from the constituent side and we did a survey several hundred constituents and you know I think you know roughly half of them were of the opinion that you know they’re uncomfortable with government usage and Rachel you alluded to this earlier like we’re fine giving our data to so many people but when it comes to government sometimes there’s a real hesitancy there and you know I think given that a lot of times it is very personal very important information you know I think this is a place where we see that come to fruition is how do we think about making sure that the constituents who we’re all serving feel more comfortable with the usage of it is there anything in particular you think as you know as both gvtech leaders but also just people who are trying to serve the constituents that this group should be thinking about as they’re thinking about how we bridge that chasm between hey we know that there’s potential there but we have a lot of people who you know at least have some level of unease.

This stat sort of blew my mind. The Gen Z sort of mistrust of AI because it feels very counterintuitive to me of a generation that wants to just do everything on their phones. I suppose they could have said that about millennials too. Just every generation is like, “Can you believe how much time they’re spending on their phones?” But what this tells me is Gen Z, in my experience, prefers overcommunication rather than undercommunication. I think I’m a millennial, pretty comfortable with my systems not telling me what’s going on in the background and then just like spitting out the thing I need. That’s fine with me. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true with the next generation. And I think that governments while my instinct would be to just have better services using AI and everyone would be satisfied having better services that they wouldn’t really want to get into why and how it was happening. I think that’s not true for Jenzi. And so the more that there can be a conversation about the systems being chosen, really sort of outwardly facing data sharing, really clear KPIs in terms of implementing new technologies and systems and levels of accountability externally in terms of either publications or more sort of nativity in these spaces that Gen Z is already going to whether it’s Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube or any of these places that they’re already spending time. I think that’s probably the best way to engage that audience, but it is more transparency over less. Even though the previous generations maybe don’t need that as much.

So, I just want to start off that I think Rachel just gave us a humble brag that she’s a millennial. So, we’ll just start there. I trust my government. Look at that 4%. So, as a Gen Xer, I know we’re cynical and skeptical and, you know, I don’t know whatever created us, even though I think we’re the first real techy generation. I was surprised with this result myself. I actually the majority of the people I hang out with are Gen X’s and so like and then my sons they’re both Gen Zers and I know both of them would embrace AI automation better government so I was a little surprised by the uncomfortableness of the result but you know surveys are surveys I mean I could tell you that from the last election you know if we based it on surveys that Kamla would have been president already but that’s not what happened so I think like these surveys would just telling of what different people are feeling and it’s a snapshot in time. But I do think we have an opportunity here to oh by the way the workforce we did a workforce sort of a population like hey raise your hand if you’re part of this generation Nasio did it too. Right now it’s like 80% of our state population are Gen X and then the next folks that are coming up or Jere so I’m thinking is that why we’re not adopting AI so quickly? I mean I have to look at this result and figure out like why aren’t we adopting this then Jenzers come on buddies like you guys are taking notes like we need to embrace what the possibilities are. I wish Jenzie was watching this webinar but they are definitely not

we lost them one minute to the general choir before Yeah. Jenzie. Yeah, I think we lost them one minute into this. Now we do our Tik Tok dance and that’s when we start to bring it.

All right, let’s get ready. We’re doing this.

Something no one wants to see for me at least. I don’t know about
Yeah, we practice this. You guys, come on. Tom. Tom, you got this, man.
I guess as we bring this home, you know, be curious to get your guys take. You know, as we think about where this heads going forward, you know, I think Alberto, I loved where you were headed of, hey, we’re just scratching the surface on the lowhanging fruit. And I think, you know, especially from the government side, it feels like, you know, after more than a decade of doing this, like I’ve never seen our clients as excited about the potential from a technology perspective and the impact it’s going to have. I’d be curious like as you guys put on your crystal ball and think about where we head next, like what’s the things we should be thinking about and this group should be thinking about that we’re going to head to as we move forward?

Oh man. I mean, it’s such an exciting and slightly terrifying time. I think that we’re just going to see systems working entirely differently than we’ve ever seen them in the next 5 years. And I think that that is truly what government needs. Even conservatively, it’s what we need. We’ve got changing demographics. We’ve got changing ages. We’ve got changing socioeconomic statuses. We’ve got changing social policies. And the more adaptable that government can be to the needs of constituents and sort of the compliance it needs to maintain across a lot of different agendas. Let’s say politely, a lot of different agendas. I think that that’s wonderful. I think that the leaders that will be at the forefront of that are those that are cautiously optimistic, not blindly optimistic, but cautiously so and understand that there’s some really tremendous potential here and are not afraid to get a couple of things wrong. I think there has to be a little bit of comfort with experimentation and the private sector has to adapt to that. Meaning, we can’t be charging a lot for pilots. We have to make it as low risk as possible for people to try on all of these ideas for size. And so there’s going to be some adaptation on both sides of the spectrum, both from the buyers and the sellers to say, how do we make this implementation as low risk and high reward as possible very quickly and try a lot of things very quickly and not have all of them work and have that not be the end of the world. So a little bit of a conceptual shift.

I totally agree and I think we’re underestimating the comfort of the public in this space. And so when I saw that I think I shared it earlier like 40% of the DMV population went away. They did it online and they did it online through just new capabilities because they didn’t want they wanted government to be faster. You know, nobody should take that long to give you a credential, to give you a title, to give you a benefit, to give you a credential. Like I mean, I remember even 15 years ago, Lori Wolf was the director of health welfare and she said, “Why are we taking 30 to 60 days to determine if someone qualifies for foods?” She’s like, “I want same day send same day eligibility,” which she ended up actually accomplishing. Right. So based on like pro you know OCM and just sort of reorganization and technology but I think I asked the same question of every director why does it take you so long to determine a credential a benefit a decision on something like why in today’s world why does it take this long so to me it feels like I can’t be too big of an evangelist of AI but I don’t mind being the person that challenges why it’s like learning about the business and then saying it takes you x number of days to make a decision on this.

Why maybe we should map out your process and see if there’s a way that we can help you with technology to help you accelerate like what your constituents would want to see in government like to make government better. So for me it’s just I always lead with this. I feel like it’s not an unreasonable conversation to have and I think lawmakers budget decision makers like JFAC are asking the same question. you know, why has it taken, you know, like say Secretary of State to issue business license that long? Like what’s taking so long? Or why does it take so long for health and welfare to do a removal for food stamps? And so to me, it just feels like I for labor to, you know, an insurance claim, whatever it is, like government can be better if they just let down their guard a little bit and let’s just talk about how we can automate some of this stuff. But I love what Rachel says. It’s not like being overly optimistic. You have to be a cautious optimist around how we’re going to do this and how we’re going to safely do this because if we let you loose with this stuff, you’re going to get us in trouble. So, let’s not ruin it with doing it like just quick and dirty. Like, let’s figure it out how to do it safely. So, I would say the possibilities are endless. But we have to have some

Well, really appreciate you both today. Hopefully the audience got back half as much as I got out of the conversation.