Gov. Phil Murphy established the AI Task Force in October 2023 with Executive Order 346 (EO 346). The state has made continual advancements in this area before and after the group’s conception, including issuance of an AI policy, establishment of an AI hub, creation of an AI strategy, and the release of the NJ AI Assistant.
The AI Task Force’s November report to the governor was called for as part of EO 346. It includes a landscape and risk assessment and offers recommendations in four key areas: 1) safety, security, technology and privacy; 2) workforce training, jobs of the future and training public professionals; 3) AI, equity and literacy; and 4) making New Jersey a hub for AI innovation.
“Everything that’s proposed in here is something that we’re doing, or going to do, or planning to do,” New Jersey’s Chief AI Strategist Beth Simone Noveck said of the report. Noveck co-chaired the AI Task Force with state Chief Technology Officer Chris Rein.
The report will inform both policy and strategy to support AI implementation, including data governance. As Rein explained, officials have already created an acceptable use policy to guide AI implementation across the state government, and will be augmenting data governance within the Office of Information Technology and other agencies.
“No AI solution that we offer is ever going to be better than the data that it is trained on,” Rein said, arguing that the data powering AI technologies is “mission critical” to their success.
The process for informing the state’s AI assessment and recommendations entailed surveying New Jersey’s workforce, residents, institutions and businesses in the public and private sectors.
A notable outcome from the AI Task Force’s work is that the state is investing in training its workforce in the AI space. Both Murphy’s commitment and the report’s findings contributed to the state’s prioritization of this work. So far, 10,000 public-sector workers and counting have been trained and gotten practice using AI tools, Noveck said. Part of the purpose, she said, is to ensure that people developing AI policy for the state have the necessary understanding of the technologies being governed.
The state’s workforce training is expanding, too. Noveck pointed to a series of grant programs that will support AI curriculum development for students, who she underlined will be “the workers of tomorrow.”
While there is no formal or legal timeline for implementing the recommendations outlined in the report, Noveck said that they are already underway or forthcoming. She emphasized that the state’s AI work has been ongoing.
For example, the NJ AI Assistant was created to offer workers a safe environment in which they could practice using AI technology without the risk of state information being put into a private vendor’s website. Another AI implementation in the early days of the task force’s work involved the use of AI-assisted tools for call center employees.
When agencies implement new technologies, there has long been a systems architecture review process. This process, according to Rein, has now been augmented to include a series of questions related to AI as part of the state’s change review process.
Officially, the task force’s work has concluded. However, Noveck said the task force is comprised of members of state leadership who regularly communicate and collaborate with or without the formal existence of the task force, including in frequent AI-focused discussions.
Rein said the relationships built through this task force — including those in government and in the education and private sectors — are the most rewarding part of the work.
Noveck highlighted the importance of the governor supporting responsible AI use, from investing in upskilling to forming the task force. The governor has the power to recreate this or a similar task force as needed, but even without doing so, Noveck said “the conversations are continuing, even without the need for a formal extension of the task force.”
