• April 26, 2024

The State of Texas announced it has formed an Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AI-CoE) that will support AI initiatives across its state agencies, local governments and public colleges and universities. The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) said the AI-CoE will focus on all branches of AI, including RPA, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and contact center technologies.

In a recent conversation with RPA Today, Krishna Edathil, DIR’s director of Enterprise Solution Services who will lead for the AI-CoE, said, for an organization as large as the State of Texas, technologies like these will completely change how it conducts business.

“Not only can they improve our own employee experiences and work product, they also enable much better customer service to our constituents, either directly, using NLP to understand the intent of a constituent request and RPA to solve the constituent’s problem in real-time or by freeing employees to focus on high-touch constituent service,” Edathil told RPA Today. “ML and AI models also enable self-healing and can ‘train’ bots through repetition, making them even more valuable to an agency. These technologies, RPA in particular, change how we drive productivity and make it much easier for the business to participate in automating processes that will deliver the greatest value.”

The AI-CoE will educate and evangelize within state government for AI, supporting the implementation of technologies that will increase efficiency and productivity.

“With this initiative, we will conduct training, coaching events, and hands-on workshops to help agencies explore AI proof-of-concepts and rapid prototyping in developing standards and best practices,” Edathil said.