How Government Is Training Its Workforce For The AI Revolution

While Federal agencies are racing to experiment with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), government AI experts agree on a critical next step: ensuring the workforce knows how to use these powerful new tools and feels confident doing so.

At the Federal IT Efficiency Summit on July 10, officials from two major departments shared how they are moving beyond simple deployment to focus on comprehensive employee training.

From Blank Screens to Bespoke Prompts

Andrea Brandon, the deputy assistant secretary at the Department of the Interior (DoI), described the reality check her agency faced after installing "DoI ChatGPT" for employees. Despite its availability, adoption was not automatic.

“I will tell you that once it was installed, not everybody understood how to use it,” Brandon said. “Right away, I started getting emails from staff... telling me, ‘What is this? There’s no instructions for how to use it. It’s just a big black screen.’”

The assumption that employees would be familiar with the technology from personal use proved incorrect. “I guess everyone’s too busy doing their actual job to play around with it after work,” she explained.

To bridge this gap, the DoI developed a prompt script with tailored examples for its diverse lines of business, including finance, budget, grants, and property management. This practical guide showed employees exactly how to use ChatGPT to "accelerate and streamline and produce efficiencies within your job," Brandon noted. The effort successfully reduced fear and encouraged adoption across the department.

NASA's Grassroots Summer of AI

NASA encountered a similar need for workforce enablement and took a "grassroots" approach to build comfort and competency from the ground up. David Salvagnini, NASA's Chief Data and AI Officer, said the agency's strategy is to "expose people [to] the tools, get them comfortable with them, get them learning how to prompt... and then letting the use cases emerge from that awareness.”

This strategy was embodied in their "Summer of AI" campaign, a three-month intensive training and learning surge across the agency. The results were impressive:

• Approximately 4,000 participants joined 40 different events over 90 days.
• There was a 300 percent increase in employees taking their first-ever AI training.
• The campaign directly reached about one-third of the entire NASA workforce.

“That’s been rather successful,” Salvagnini stated. “We’re putting the tools in the hands of the workforce, we’re letting them be comfortable with [the tools], and then starting to find ways in which those tools can be more capable.”