Shapiro says AI has ‘real promise’ as he unveils pilot program results

Gov. Josh Shapiro continued to paint Pennsylvania government as a leader in artificial intelligence on Friday as he shared the results of a state pilot program that provided just under 200 employees in his administration with access to ChatGPT Enterprise over the last year.

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Shapiro called generative artificial intelligence “one of the most significant technological developments of our time” and urged government leaders to stay ahead of the rapidly evolving technology. “It will likely lead to a new era, just as the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution did in this country over the last century or so. It is, of course, evolving far more rapidly than any other technology in the past two decades, and it holds great promise, as long as we are clear-eyed in our purpose,” he said. “As a government, I believe we cannot fall behind. To best serve our fellow Pennsylvanians, we must evolve with it. There are too many public officials who think they can stick their head in the sand and ignore this – try and ban emerging technologies. I believe we need to embrace them. We need to use it for the betterment of society and the betterment of the people we serve.” 

Pennsylvania’s pilot program

According to exit surveys of state employees who utilized ChatGPT, the administration estimates that participating employees spent an average of 35 minutes per day using the technology and saved approximately 95 minutes per day by doing so. 

Participating employees worked across 14 different state government agencies, and a total of 85% of participants said they had a “somewhat positive” or “very positive” experience using ChatGPT, according to the Shapiro administration’s report on the pilot program. 

The pilot program provided 175 administration employees with ChatGPT Enterprise, with the state receiving direct feedback from 136 employees who participated. According to the state, 48% of participants had never used ChatGPT prior to the pilot program. 

Employees received support and training on AI tools throughout the initiative. They reported using ChatGPT for a range of different projects, with the most common uses centered around writing assistance, text generation, research, generating summaries, and coding and other tech assistance. 

One unnamed pilot program participant reported using ChatGPT to help develop a public health marketing campaign. “The tool greatly increased the speed in which I was able to ‘see’ what something would look like and helped to rip through rough ideas quickly,” the participant said. Another employee used ChatGPT to assist with consolidating state policies.

Kaylene Wance, an eLearning developer for the Bureau of Talent Development at the state Office of Administration, was one state worker who participated in the pilot program. She said Friday that while she was initially skeptical of using AI, she learned how to sharpen her prompts and create a tool that can translate policy and legal language into easier-to-understand language.

“Generative AI has become a powerful tool in my daily workflow, and it saves me time and helps me focus on those more complex tasks,” Wance said during Friday’s press conference. “But this experience also reinforced something important, and we’ve mentioned it a couple times – that AI is just a tool to enhance our creativity and efficiency, but it can’t replace human expertise. It can’t replace my personal instincts, which are honed by years of on-the-job experience that I’ve acquired to be effective in my job. It’s also not the right tool for every task.”

According to the pilot program report, some participants encountered issues with ChatGPT, including difficulty generating images, errors extracting text from a PDF document, and challenges getting the app to produce accurate citations.

Next steps on AI

Shapiro said Friday that his administration will expand access to ChatGPT tools after a successful pilot program. 

“Beginning on June 1, we will involve more employees and give them more generative AI tools to get more stuff done for the good people of Pennsylvania,” the governor said. “We will expand based on these valuable lessons that we learned here, and as we embrace these new technologies, we will continue to put our employees and the people of Pennsylvania first as part of our next steps on AI.”

Shapiro and others stressed on Friday that AI tools should be used within state government to assist workers, not replace them. The governor also wrote in a March 21 letter that his administration will “include union-covered employees in future potential pilot programs and initiatives,” while adding that his administration will adopt generative AI tools for the purposes of improving efficiency and productivity, “not with the agenda of substituting Commonwealth employees with AI.”

The Shapiro administration also announced the creation of a Generative AI Labor and Management Collaboration Group that will take feedback from employees, including unionized workers, and stay in communication with the Office of Administration’s director of emerging technologies. 

“We’re going to continue to support and empower nearly 80,000 public servants who I consider to be my colleagues in making progress here for Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said Friday. “We’ll continue to seek their feedback and value their expertise and their experience, because it’s only through that thorough engagement that will ultimately deliver the best results.”

That drew praise from Steve Catanese, the president of Service Employees International Union Local 668, which represents approximately 20,000 ​​social service workers. 

“As the pilot data shows, workers are interested in the positive opportunities that generative AI presents, but they still have concerns as well. They have concerns about their privacy. They have concerns about their future, and they want to be included in this process,” he said. “Moving forward, union workers will have an opportunity to have a voice in what this future looks like with generative AI.”