Ask Claudia: the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA) AI assistant

For decades, human resource officials have been worrying about the difficulties of implementing effective knowledge transfer practices leaving agencies with a chronic malady: institutional brain-drain.

New Jersey, like many other states, is suffering through a major loss of institutional knowledge as long-tenured employees retire from public service. “There are people retiring with 40 years of experience and the next person has 10 to 15 years at most,” said John Harrison, director of Information Technology at the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA), a state agency that offers programs that serve local governments, businesses, and residents in New Jersey.

New Jersey is addressing this governmental deficit with its “Ask Claudia” AI assistant, which is currently in development and is expected to be released in October. The AI assistant has been named after a high-level supervisor at the Department of Community affairs, named Claudia, who has developed an unparalleled depth of knowledge and experience in the science of judging whether applications qualify for benefits by applying program policies and regulations to individual cases.

Currently, it’s a common occurrence for other employees to tap Claudia on the shoulder to ask questions that she can answer off the top of her head but might take hours of research to uncover otherwise.

If Claudia wasn’t available to them, what would staffers do?

“We’re creating the ‘Ask Claudia’ AI assistant,” explained Harrison, “so when Claudia retires in the imminent future, people can still ask Claudia, but they’re asking the AI assistant." Naming the tool after a real living human being, with whom employees are already comfortable interacting, may well help them make the shift more comfortable in using AI for similar purposes.

“We’ll try to move as much of her brain into the system as we can,” he continued. “And when she does leave, we’re going to have a system that can continue to grow with knowledge over time with more data points as more cases are processed. As more junior staff ‘ask Claudia’ a question, that will increase the AI assistant’s knowledge.” This pilot may lead to the same approach taken to capture institutional knowledge held by senior retiring employees in other areas.

“We want to build institutional knowledge in the AI, so we don’t have a knowledge drain,” said Harrison. “We want to capture it. We want to put some boundaries around it, build a little dam and keep all that information in the institution.”

This AI assistant is intended to be used only by government employees and is not intended to be accessed by the public in the near future. “We’re trying to become experts on AI before we worry about the security and privacy issues that come with using it to interact with the public,” Harrison said. “The adjudicators on benefit applications will be able to use this internal AI assistant to ask policy questions. It has access to our policy documents and previous case data.”

Harrison added, “We’re keeping humans in the loop, and AI isn’t making any decisions or adjudicating any benefit case decisions. It’s just providing policy information and relevant information for the case being processed.”

As author and consultant Peter Drucker said decades ago, “In today’s environment, the most important resource is knowledge.” Perhaps systems like ‘Ask Claudia’ will be the equivalent of placing that resource in the bank and watching it gather interest.

Attribution: Case study provided to the AI Navigator courtesy of the IBM Centre for The Business of Government, Apolitical's content partner. “AI in State Government: Balancing Innovation, Efficiency, and Risk”, https://www.businessofgovernment.org/reports/ai-in-state-government, IBM Centre for The Business of Government.