Original article published on Linkedin by Dustin Lanier, CPPO Founder/Principal at Civic Initiatives.
When consumer-available Generative AI splashed on the scene in late 2022, it was mesmerizing - the ability to instantly generate human-level responses on any topic, available to all with no cost or barrier.
The opportunity to improve efficiency and capacity is still untapped, as formal adoption is still slow. Governments are moving carefully through the use cases and applying traditional technology review and adoption approaches.
How can we reinvigorate this potential? My new speech falls into three parts:
Commit to a Staff Skill-up Mentality
We should be as focused on the staff skills part of GenAI as we are on the technology platform decisions, and not delay staff skill development while we perfect our deployments.
If we treat GenAI as a pure tech issue, it is a huge, missed opportunity. The unique nature of Gen AI - to truly act as an experienced assistant to be directed with human judgment - demands an ai-ready workforce.
To quote my friend Ed Mills from the University of Colorado, how do we move staff from "aware to ready to forward." At the absolute minimum staff skill development should run in parallel with the tech decision processes. This is done with specific use cases, education on prompt engineering, and hands-on exercises.
"Design for Dialogue"
In a Harvard Business Review article in early 2024 titled "Your Organization Isn’t Designed to Work with GenAI," Paul Baier, David Delallo, and John Sviokla argue that we should be regarding GenAI as groundbreaking and therefore we should be "Designing for Dialogue."
A few of the many thoughtful quotes from this article
“Many deployers are hitting roadblocks... because of a fundamental flaw in the approach: They think of Gen AI as a traditional form of automation rather than as an assistive agent that gets smarter - and makes humans smarter - over time."
“AI doesn't function like a traditional technology - users talk to it much like they would to a human colleague, and it works with users iteratively"
"Unlike traditional, technology-driven process redesign principles that focus on taking capabilities "out" of the human and putting them “into” machine, Design for Dialogue is rooted in the idea that technology and humans can share responsibilities dynamically."
Designing for Dialogue has many interesting implications on public procurement that I go through in more detail in the speech.
Get Into the Lab
The main pathway to get into this style of deployment is to establish a secure environment for staff to build skills, with actionable use cases and task-specific prompt libraries. By building direct skills and understanding of the practical application, we are equipping staff with the skills we need them to have in the coming decades.
There are several examples of institutions taking this path, and I highlight them in the speech. We are also putting our money where (my mouth) is and have developed the tools we are rolling out at Civic and are happy to share what we have learned so this approach becomes pervasive.
