State to develop new AI marketplace for staff

The State Department is taking new steps in its modernization plan that will marry advanced technologies with ongoing diplomatic efforts, continuing its expansion into leveraging artificial intelligence for daily operations.

Matthew Graviss, State’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer, told Nextgov/FCW that his agency is treating its AI endeavors as programs, not products. 

“It's something that we're really focused on maturing and adding more and more capabilities through our journey for years to come,” Graviss said on Thursday. “We're not staying static.”

The agency recently incorporated its Foreign Affairs Manual into its internal chatbot’s parameters to enable the software to deliver summary responses on dense information, he explained. 

Further down the road, State is working on creating a new AI marketplace to bring specialized AI capabilities to a myriad of State employees. 

“You have chief information officers, chief data officers throughout various bureaus of the State Department who we want to help in accelerating their modernization through artificial intelligence,” he said. “So what we're going through right now is those requirements of ‘What can we do as an enterprise provider to help them accelerate their journey? How do we support them in allowing them to connect their data, their workflow, to AI tools so that they can gain efficiency and effectiveness in servicing their missions, their ambassadors [and] their diplomats overseas?’”

This marketplace will first address the data and model needs for specific use cases, along with appropriate AI guardrails to ensure security for State Department end users. Garviss added that this won’t be a single-vendor solution, but act as a flexible vehicle for multiple approved AI softwares to be deployed. 

Kelly Fletcher, the chief information officer at State, said that the AI marketplace’s unveiling will be a question of “months, not years.”

“As we continue to evolve here, I think we've actually sort of trained our workforce to understand: what you get on day one is not what you have on day 15,” Fletcher told Nextgov/FCW. “Through this iterative process, we keep adding capabilities.”

Some of these capabilities will eventually include handling classified data. The goal for the chatbot, for example, is to have it tailored to an individual user and customize its outputs. Safely incorporating personalized and classified data into its AI tools is another key objective for State in the coming 6 to 12 months, Fletcher said. 

“Already we've built into the chatbot that it knows who you are when you use it,” she said. “We are driving really hard so that we have a posture where we can use these kinds of tools at the secret level. But that's going to take a ton of work on the core infrastructure part of the house.”

Fletcher added that the rollout of new AI tools, such as the marketplace, will depend on new technologies to potentially expedite the development and deployment process. 

“Part of what's happening is that technology is changing, and we are leaning in to take advantage of it to improve our ability to drive diplomacy with technology,” she said. 

Leadership at State has also touted the agency’s recent technological advancements. During a Wednesday briefing at the Foreign Service Institute, State Secretary Antony Blinken outlined ongoing steps in his agency’s modernization agenda, touching on the achievements over the last year and the future direction for emerging technologies at State to better grapple with a complex geopolitical environment.

“With all of this focus on reorganization and making sure that the institutional building blocks of the department were fit for purpose, we also knew that to truly modernize our diplomacy, we had to embrace new tools and some new tactics to become more innovative, more nimble, more effective,” Blinken said.