The Biden administration wants agencies to explore the transformative role that generative artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) could have on government work.

“As generative AI products become widely available and common in online platforms, agencies are discouraged from imposing broad general bans or blocks on agency use of generative AI,” noted the sweeping executive order issue by the White House in October 2023

Before the executive order, agencies such as the Department of the Navy, General Services Administration and Environmental Protection Agency had all put limits on how their staffs could use generative AI tools in the workplace.

Tony Holmes, practice lead for solutions architects public sector at Pluralsight, said generative AI represents the latest in is a series of historical shifts in technology that will reshape the modern government workplace.

“If you think about it, generative AI is poised to redefine our toolkit that we use for work. It’s not really just another tool for a specific niche, but it’s going to be a fundamental shift in how we approach problems and execute tasks,” Holmes said during Federal News Network’s AI and Data Exchange.

“The key difference is the scale and speed of this transformation. Generative AI’s integration into the workforce isn’t about just learning a new software application,” he added. “It’s about adapting to the technology that can learn and adapt to us and to our workflows in many ways and actually think alongside us.”

Potential disruptive innovation of generative AI

Holmes compared the advent of generative AI tools to the rise of the desktop computer in most offices decades ago.

“If we look at that era, there were so many people panicking because word processors were going to make executive assistants obsolete — because obviously people would write and create their own documents. And obviously, this didn’t happen. It simply changed the dynamics of the role,” he said. “The biggest attrition typically happens in the workplace, as it does with all technology shifts, not randomly. But instead, it most often happens to those that are the least willing to adapt to the changing environment.”

While generative AI remains a fast-moving technology with rapidly evolving capabilities, Holmes said it already has led to products that can serve as people’s “data-driven AI co-pilot” that can augment them in completing work, rather than replacing them.

“We can look at complex data quickly and kind of analyze it in real time. And we can work with generative AI to help brainstorm creative solutions, which allows people in the workplace to focus on the much more strategic and creative and interpersonal aspects of their roles,” he said. “That’s really important because generative AI is very good at a particular set of tasks. But it requires context from us. The human is still very much driving creativity in the strategy.”

Despite concerns that AI and automation will lead to job displacement, Holmes views generative AI, like any transformative technology, as creating a lot of opportunities for workforce development.

Recent research from MIT reported that 36% of jobs have at least one task that can be automated by AI, but that for most jobs, that automated task makes up a small fraction of the overall duties involved in that role. The research also found automating most of an employee’s tasks is not economical because of the high upfront costs of developing highly customized AI systems.

“What we’re much more likely to see, at least in the short to medium term, is that while substantial automation is possible, the displacement is likely to be much more gradual in pace,” Holmes said. “The key to mitigation is to focus on getting your teams to embrace the upskilling and reskilling along the lines of AI in a broad way — just as just as proficiency in word processing and spreadsheets became essential in the early days of desktop computers.”

He added that AI literacy could soon become a fundamental skill for new roles and also create new types of jobs too.

“What that means is not displacement but actually making the existing roles more impactful and more fulfilling. It’s much more about working alongside generative AI and taking away the mundane stuff that we don’t necessarily like to do by using its capabilities — actually elevating our roles to become a more meaningful, creative, and strategic person within that row,” Holmes said.

Generative AI: A tool to benefit anyone in your workforce

Holmes said Pluralsight is working with its federal customers to approach generative AI with a “broad-based mindset,” recognizing that almost everybody in the workforce today can benefit from its use.

“It has a huge potential to enhance the work of everybody, from administrative staff to senior executives and everybody in between. Where we help our customers start is with demystifying generative AI for employees, making its principles and its potential applications and ethical considerations accessible and understandable for everybody,” he said.

“We’re so used to training specific technologists specific tasks. But in this case, I think it shouldn’t be confined to tech teams but extended across the board, ensuring that each department, each role, understands how generative AI can creatively be applied to their specific contexts, not just today, but going forward in the future.”

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