“We have to hold hands as we are crossing this river, because, we don’t know what to expect,” Khaled Tawfik, San Jose chief information officer and head of the Department of Information Technology, told an audience at the GovAI Coalition Summit* Thursday.
The gathering in San Jose convened hundreds of technologists from the public and private sectors to discuss the opportunities, challenges and concerns surrounding AI. The GovAI Coalition coalesced in November 2023 with 50 people on a Zoom call. Today, it includes some 1,700 professionals from about 550 government organizations.
“There are risks that come along with this [AI]. And we have to think about those risks as we’re looking to deploy,” Dan Clarke, president of AI governance platform Truyo, said during a panel with Bianca Lochner, Scottsdale, Ariz., CIO, about some of the policies surrounding the use of AI in her city. Scottsdale has an AI review committee to examine use cases, risks and concerns related to new technologies.
“We need to make sure that we have a robust governing structure in place to ensure ethical and transparent use of those innovations,” Lochner said during the panel, adding there needs to be a clear framework for risk management, “to ensure that we minimize the risk to the public, but also maintaining public trust.”
These are the kinds of policy conversations happening in the GovAI Coalition, to ensure AI tools are not rolled out haphazardly or withheld because government leaders lack the confidence good public policy brings.
“If any of us get a black eye for implementing the wrong AI, then all of us will have a black eye. One system that goes wrong can compromise our credibility nationwide,” said Tawfik, who characterized AI as a bit of déjà vu.
“I’ve seen this movie before,” he remarked, recalling areas of interest like cybersecurity or social media, waves that started small and grew into a tsunami of worry — and opportunity — for government technology departments.
“If we knew in 2000 what we know today, and we did just 1 percent, we would have been ahead,” Tawfik said of cybersecurity. “Even in San Jose, we were not ready,” he said of AI. “We were shocked. We anticipated ChatGPT, or generative AI, to be as advanced — eventually. We did not expect it to happen so fast. And definitely, we did not expect it to be open to the public, for everyone to access, so fast. That caught us by surprise.”
“And this is really one of the things we are trying to do with the Coalition,” he said. “How do we learn from our mistakes — our past — so that we can be better positioned with AI in 2050.”
*The GovAI Coalition Summit was hosted by Government Technology in partnership with the GovAI Coalition and the city of San Jose.
