AI can help governments see around corners

Government agencies at all levels are searching for the answer to one question: What can AI do for me today? An underused AI application is to generate leading indicators of issues on the horizon, empowering agency leaders to get ahead of challenges before they become full-blown crises. And all it requires is a mindset shift. THE LIMITS OF TRADITIONAL DASHBOARDS In very broad strokes, government agencies are working with quantitative and qualitative data. Agencies most commonly view quantitative data (hard numbers and program metrics) in dashboards. In other words, it is traditional data. This data is critical for assessing the efficacy of an initiative after-the-fact, and AI applied here can accelerate the production of data visualizations and analyses. But such aggregated quantitative dashboards nonetheless lag behind real-time, ground truth. This is, in part, by design. And it has real utility in government operations. But it doesn’t help agency leaders see around corners. In other words, it doesn’t surface leading indicators that can help government leaders detect gaps and prevent crises before they happen. QUALITATIVE DATA IS DIFFERENT Qualitative data manifests in things like questions asked and resources needed by public servants. To identify what public servants on the front lines are thinking, feeling, and asking about, an agency typically needs an army of consultants to manually collect this information and collate it into something useful. This can take weeks, if not months. AI can dramatically expedite and scale qualitative data analysis to capture the “why” behind the “what.” Data from a case management system, for example, is quantitative data that pipes into a dashboard. Qualitative data is the transcript of the weekly task force meeting where questions are asked and answered before the case management system is updated. What happens in the community meeting or conversations between peers translating policy into practice is also valuable qualitative,