Data subcommittee reports progress on AI governance, pilot trainings and vendor list

Adam Carpenter, Department Administration chief data officer, summarized the data subcommittee’s work on AI governance and agency readiness. Carpenter said the group is balancing rapid tool adoption with development of governance, training and measurement so results can be trusted rather than blindly accepted.

Chief AI Officer Chris Tarabocha said the effort is grassroots and focused on tangible agency use cases and training: "Right now, we have a Teams channel that's available to anybody in the state. There's about 450 people on the Teams channel, so they can get kind of real time access to people, asking their questions," Tarabocha said, describing coffee-chat drop-in sessions and Copilot training pilots. He also noted that an AI master-agreement RFP-qualified vendor list is available for procurement.

Carpenter said the subcommittee also reviewed work linking executive program-service inventories to budgeting systems to measure whether programs deliver value, and that answering those measurement questions will take multi-year statistical groundwork. The commission praised the early work and asked staff to continue cross-agency pilots and governance development before the upcoming session.