Fed Gov Today’s Post

Transcript

Structure upgrades agencies are making are the subject of lots of strategies across government. Alex Martinez is director of public sector partners at AWS. He says making sure infrastructure is ready to maximize AI's potential starts with one big question. Yeah, absolutely. Well, well, first, I'm excited to talk about this because of just the impact this can have to so many different parts of citizen services. But that impact often gets back to how do we get the data that each of these agencies have and make it available to these AI models and these pieces of technology. And that really requires modernization. And so for agencies workloads where we haven't gotten to modernization yet, I think there's just a tremendous opportunity for us to be able to go. Faster and and really understand what it is that those legacy code bases have everyone has a story right they still have a mainframe they still have this information that's locked in place and perhaps maybe even started a modernization they had a project that's underway and they find that it gets stalled and so they're not really able to take advantage of the benefits of scalability and agility that you get from cloud infrastructure and so in some ways it's good to be late because these new AI. Capabilities really allow you to understand that infrastructure, even if the teams that originally built it are gone. And it allows you to come up with a plan and then even create the test, be able to understand and get confidence about doing that modernization. And so for those workloads, that data that you really need to feed these AI models that might be locked away in these legacy systems, you now have these code companions and they're, they're able to go pull that together. For you and then in some cases even go execute it. And so I think that's the area where I get most excited is making progress for those those different areas that we haven't seen in many years. And then now we have access to the data that we need to create these new citizen services right. Making progress. The implication there is speed. If we apply the people process technology rubric to this. What are the things that should happen in each of those areas to drive that speed that you see Alex Yeah well, I I think it always starts with. Right. You know, we get excited about the technology. I'm a technologist and we help build, but we've got a skills gap. And so when we think about the folks that are operating these systems, you know, the first thing that I think about is what are the ways in which we can train and get them smart on the technology. And this is another great area where the technology actually is bleeding back to the people. And we're taking advantage of these different AI assistants to be able to do training and not just training that's hey, I want to go learn about infrastructure. Data, but I want to get answers that are specific to the systems, the design documents, those database schemas and say, hey, this is something about your system and here's how you can use that information and here's some of the best methods to proceed and so that really addresses this idea about the people aspect. I think the other cultural right we talked about the, you know the people of the technology. I've already mentioned technology, but the cultural piece that we really want to ingrain here is you know we've done many, many years we've taken a look at these huge modernization. Areas and so we sort of get paralyzed by we want to do the whole thing and so how do we create engines to be able to do this sort of cloud adoption. Now we have, you know, AI adoption within our cloud adoption framework and so how do we get that engine going very fast and that means building the agility and the culture to be able to create experimentation. And so again, you're you're able to take advantage of the technology here because you can, you know, go build tests that allow you to feel confident to move faster than you had in the past. And so those are the kind of the key things that I walk away. With that, really get me excited about how quickly we can move and make progress in all three areas. Is it helpful or not helpful long term that so many rank and file employees in the government are exposed to generative AI tools in their private lives and can bring at least some knowledge about that to work or, or maybe it's not helpful because they're learning bad habits at home. Well, you know, both things can be true, right? As is often the case, but I think it's it's important because we set the bar high. And by exposing our workforces about what's possible, then we can really demand the pace to move quickly and it gives them an understanding of it. So, you know, I think one of the anti patterns I talked about that as a technologist, right? What are the things that you look for is we're going to create an ivory tower team that's going to come in and work on AI services. And I think we've learned over time building that isn't helpful, right? We want to create centers of excellence, but we really need this to be ingrained in understood throughout the entire workforce. That used to be successful transformations and so by being able to be exposed to it, they're demanding it and they're going to be part of the change that's necessary when you're going to operate these AI driven systems.