Captured by the GenAI zeitgeist: How generative AI is shaping government transformation

Amongst the speakers at the keynote of Amazon Web Services’ Public Sector Summit held recently in Washington DC was CIA’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Innovation, Lakshmi Raman, who neatly summed up the fascination government leaders increasingly have with generative AI (GenAI).

“We [CIA] were captured by the GenAI zeitgeist, just like the entire world was for the past couple of years. But we also think about it in terms of search and discovery assistance, writing assistance, ideation, helping us with brainstorming, helping us generate counter arguments,” she shared.

During her fireside chat, she spoke broadly about how the intelligence agency is building foundational capabilities to better leverage AI, competition in the AI space across government, and the potential for AI to support the CIA’s national security efforts.

To dive deeper into how GenAI is reshaping government transformation efforts, GovInsider spoke to key leaders at AWS, including Vice President of Field Technology and Engineering, Dominic Delmolino, and Director of Government Transformation, Liam Maxwell.

Under the radar transformation

What struck this writer about both conversations was the perspective that GenAI is not changing the operations of government in flashy or dramatic ways – rather, the transformation is moving quietly while offering dramatic benefits, such as cost savings and increased accessibility for residents.

“Where we're seeing generative AI taking steps in government is where it's ripping the cost out of things which previously cost a lot of money. A lot of these projects are going under the radar because people are just getting on with it,” said Maxwell.

He shared the example of Swindon Borough Council in the United Kingdom, which uses GenAI-based AWS tools to translate and simplify documents for its 220,000 residents, who speak over 30 languages.

By adopting these tools, the local government has reportedly reduced translation costs by 99.96 per cent and shortened translation time from nearly 16 days to 14 minutes, according to AWS’ official case study.

“The pace of adoption is probably not as fast as you might think, from the press about it. Yet, the number of questions we're getting does justify the hype. So, we're seeing early adoption as well as broad based interest,” said Maxwell.

“I think we'll wake up in a year’s time and discover a huge number of uses within the public sector which have never really been trumpeted or chatted about because we're just getting on and doing it.”

Workforce development

GenAI is also alleviating one of the key challenges that digital transformation agencies face everywhere: attracting and retaining top talent. Government agencies are tapping on GenAI to augment their workforce and help them become more productive and efficient, shared Delmolino. 

To support upskilling in GenAI, the hyperscaler ran a large language model (LLM) tournament this year in Singapore, in partnership with the Singapore government, to support university students in learning how to finetune LLMs. Delmolino shares that AWS is now looking at scaling up the initiative beyond Asia.

“Many government agencies are asking, how do we not only upskill our own workforce, but the collective workforce that we draw upon, such as the contractors and partners,” he explained. AWS has provided free tech training to 31 million people as of this year, exceeding their stated goal of upskilling 29 million people by 2025.

Most agencies tasked with digital transformation need to develop internal digital capabilities, but “attracting great capabilities to work in the public sector has traditionally been difficult,” explained Maxwell, who served as the United Kingdom’s first Chief Technology Officer.

Moving to the cloud and adopting modern tech enables agencies to attract top-tier tech talent, who would otherwise balk at working with legacy IT systems, he shared.

The UK’s Government Digital Service has been credited as one of the first digital transformation units within a government globally which challenged traditional civil service approaches to e-government.

Reinforcing the need for cloud infrastructure

The heightened interest around GenAI and the continued momentum for government transformation is driving interest in cloud adoption, as opposed to hosting all systems within on-premises infrastructure, noted the speakers.

Embracing the cloud is one of the easiest ways to tap on effective AI, Maxwell explained, as users can simply access AI building blocks via services hosted on cloud computing platforms. GenAI projects have clear benefits, and teams that previously never considered digital transformation are considering it much more intently, he shared.

He noted that countries such as Singapore, which have embraced a cloud-first approach to digital transformation, have seen remarkable progress in modernisation efforts.

“Change in the public sector is very complex. It involves huge amounts of internal stakeholder management and politics. Being in a position where your undifferentiated infrastructure is taken care of gives people the ability to move faster,” explained Maxwell.

Beyond GenAI, the cloud is enabling agencies to embark on rapid improvement of core services such as taxation systems, welfare benefits, immigration services and more, due to the performance, resilience and security offered by the cloud, he shared.

Delmolino also observed an increase in DevOps capabilities within the public sector, which supports the overall resilience and security of IT systems.

DevOps is a software engineering methodology that combines two functions that are typically treated separately: software development and IT operations.

At the summit, AWS announced new initiatives to support the adoption of GenAI within the public sector, including an impact fund that public sector organisations can use to tap on AWS promotional credits and kickstart their GenAI initiatives.