USDA Sees AI Strategy Release in Coming Months – MeriTalk

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the early stages of developing its artificial intelligence strategy and hopes to go public with the strategy in the coming months, an agency technology official said.

Fredy Diaz, deputy chief data officer at USDA, discussed progress on the AI strategy’s development during a March 19 online webinar hosted by ACT-IAC.

“This is something that we’re expecting to come out in the next few months,” Diaz said.  “We’re still in the early stages, still doing some current state assessments, asking questions, doing surveys, launching interviews, but expect at some point in the next few months that USDA will launch an AI strategy.”

Diaz previewed that the strategy will include upskilling USDA personnel in the use of AI tools.

“Expect it to not just be technology choices, or use cases, but rather, what are we doing for the workforce,” he said. “How are we preparing the workforce to embrace artificial intelligence? How are we preparing our governance and our leadership to understand both the good and the bad of artificial intelligence,” Diaz said.

Diaz said the push for more use of AI technology is in part aimed at upskilling the agency workforce to allow it to “push the envelope” on attaining the agency’s goals.

“You’re going to see more things from USDA on this, but we’re going to focus on essentially how we recruit, retain, and upskill. We’re focusing on that, and we’re always looking for new innovative and unorthodox ideas in this space,” said Diaz.

“I think we’re pushing the envelope and, to be completely honest, making people uncomfortable, which is good because we need to be able to compete, we need to be able to retain the best talent, and that means pushing our back office functions a little bit,” Diaz said.

As USDA pushes for AI technology integration, the agency is also putting emphasis on making sure that its overall data strategy is aligned well with its upcoming AI strategy, he explained.

“It’s going to take a while for that to align not just to our data strategy but our IT strategic plan to the USDA strategy itself. We want to ensure alignment across the board … We’re going to spend time really thinking through that,” Diaz said.
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