What Do Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Mean for State and Local Government?
In the world of state and local government, emerging technologies are always a hot topic. Steve Towns and Joe Morris are two of our content and research experts and they have decided to cover these technologies and more in a recurring video series.
The topics of discussion this week are blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Episode 1 — Transcript
- Welcome to Mixed Results with Steve and Joe. I’m Steve Towns, deputy chief content officer for eRepublic.
- And I’m Joe Morris, vice president of research for eRupblic.
- We’re two guys that talk about technology for a living and we’re here to, wait for it… talk about technology.
- We’re gonna share some thoughts on some emerging technologies and some trends that we see popping up across state and local government.
- So, couple of big trends are blockchain and artificial intelligence. Think we’re hearing a lot more talk about those. Let’s start with blockchain. Interesting stuff, but at a really early point in it’s development. We just did some research around that. But people are starting to talk about it.
- A lot of talk about it. It seems that every event that we go to there’s a blockchain track, NASCIO, I just came back from the CCISDA conference, as well, talking about blockchain there too. Yet our survey data says that something like two or three percent of state and local governments are actively doing something in blockchain. So a lot of discussion, but not yet a lot of activity.
- Interestingly enough, we had some direct conversations with several groups of people around how they see blockchain, and out of that we have at least one CIO who is thinking about asking his vendors to talk about blockchain in upcoming RFIs and sort of build that capability into the solutions that his state’s being offered.
- It seems what gets most governments talking about it or at least thinking about it is security. We see cyber security obviously be a top priority across states, cities, and counties so the prospect of blockchain may be being more secure makes it enticing. But like you said, our survey data indicated that most are still trying to wrap their arms around what the heck is blockchain and what could it mean to their department or agency? And I think they’ll turn to a vendor or consultant to help answer those questions.
- Yeah and I think we’ll see a lot of eyes on kind of results, some of these early government deployments and is this really a better answer, can blockchain solve some problems that other technologies can’t do? The other one’s artificial intelligence and that seems to be quite a bit further along, in fact I was surprised at the research results you guys got when you asked whether people are using that technology.
- Yeah, it was pretty startling. In fact, our most recent digital county survey had 52% of counties state that they are doing something with artificial intelligence. Seemed a little high at first pass, but when we dug into it there were some pretty interesting uses, both internal and external. And we’re seeing a lot of great focuses, use cases rather, around Alexa skills.
- Yeah, that idea that you could use that chat bot technology to start answering simple questions or respond to kind of routine tasks and presumably free up your staff to do more complicated things I think is really attractive to people. Also the idea that the IVR or that technology, the chat bot technology’s getting better and it can tell if you’re frustrated and escalate rather than being caught in some sort of endless automated loop, I think is starting to make a difference, as well.
- Yeah and you’re seeing some kind of fun stuff come up in the AI space. Douglas County, Colorado rolled out an Alexa skill that allows you to ask when the most recent or upcoming event is. I saw an article out of Detroit where a student helped create an Alexa skill app to pay my water bill, simply by saying, “Pay my bill.” All of those are quite intuitive, I think that they make government a thing that is more engaged by leveraging the latest technology.
- Couple interesting things that I’d never thought of is this idea that as you use those sorts of, I don’t know, intelligent tools or intelligent softwares you almost need to treat them like you would an employee around access to systems and sort of have those checks on behavior that you don’t want happening. I thought that was intriguing around a software rather than a person. And I also think the nature of work, I mean the idea that, I don’t think anybody’s looking at this really to replace employees, but it may start to change jobs, right? If you’re taking simple tasks and automating them your employees need to be up-skilled where that starts to impact them.
- Absolutely, also presents the opportunity for cross training and pushing people to new skills and new career paths. So you have two technologies here; blockchain and automation. Automation, at least to me, seems like it’s a lot further along down the path, maybe more real to government. But yet blockchain is dominating a lot of the discussion.
- It seems to me like people are waiting for industry solutions, I don’t think this is something that governments want to build, or at this point even grasp what this is, what’s a blockchain platform? What would I build? Versus, “I might be interested if there’s a solution “out there that I can consume. “Or it’s built into something else that I already use.” I think that seems to be where we’re gonna see activity around this, and that maybe is another year or so off, although it certainly seems like industry’s putting a lot of work and attention into this. It’s still a little premature, maybe.
- So you’ve got two technologies that will continue to dominate the discussion and the event tracks across the country. If you’re looking for more insight into what’s happening across variety of technologies and the state and local government.
- Tune in for more Mixed Results.
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- How do we want to land this jet?
- I don’t know. So thanks for watching our first episode of Mixed Results with Steve and Joe. We’ll be doing this again. And we’ll be looking at, I don’t know, other technologies. Wish I wouldn’t have said I don’t know.
- Why don’t we say, thank for picking us, I’m Steve, I’m Joe.
- Thanks for watching, I’m Steve.
- And I’m Joe. Landed.
- Chris
- Bumpy, but we landed.
- We’re on the ground. Any landing that you can walk away from is a good one.
Got a suggestion?
Is there any technology you’d like covered? Feel free to drop us a line at social@erepublic.com we’ll see what we can do to bring it up in future episodes.
