Early Lessons from the Frontlines of California’s AI Push

Some of the leading voices in the state’s deliberate and methodical push into the generative AI realm recently shared some of their early lessons learned at the State of Technology — California Industry Forum* earlier this month.

Among the key takeaways were possible shifts to bid evaluation processes driven by AI-generated vendor responses, the need for enhanced public-private collaboration, and building out a more solid data governance foundation for future technology implementations.

In a room full of industry representatives at the forum, state IT and procurement leaders acknowledged the changing environment, even going as far as to say the state might have to change its approach to how it fairly and accurately evaluates bids created with the help of AI.

“If vendors are going to now be using generative AI to create RFP responses, or any sort of bid responses, I think that's something that the state's going to have to start looking at,” said state Chief Procurement Officer Angela Shell. Shell is also the deputy director of the Department of General Services Procurement Division.

The use of GenAI in the bidding space makes evaluating proposals fairly and accurately more difficult for procurement teams as vendors begin to sound more and more alike, Shell added. Exactly how the evaluation process might evolve to address this issue remains fluid — not to mention steeped in policy and procedure.

“We can tell, by the way,” Government Operations Agency (GovOps) Deputy Director Ron Robinette joked about the artificially generated bids.

The use of the innovative RFI2 has been a boon to AI-related procurements, though officials acknowledged the process is significantly more time-consuming than the traditional procurement approach.

Shell explained that the RFI2 process allows for more collaboration between the vendor and the state, and offers a chance to better assess security protocols and make changes in a secure environment.

All of the panelists were insistent about the role industry has played to this point in the state’s GenAI journey, calling for more of this sort of collaboration — even if it doesn’t result in a contract right away.

The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is not new for agencies and has been in place for more than a decade, said state Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Porat, adding that its continued evolution of AI and GenAI in government will require more work to build the data support structure for it.

Robinette echoed those sentiments, saying that the state’s focus needs to be on maturing its data outlook — not so much focused on using data to talk about what has happened, but what agency decisions will mean for service and operational outcomes. He called this process climbing the “analytics ladder.”

California Office of Data and Innovation Director Jeffery Marino said one of the biggest challenges facing the state concerning GenAI has been making sure that data governance and standardized access across a modern stack of tools is where it needs to be to effectively leverage the analytics.

“There's still a ton of opportunity as it relates to even just data access and management within the state … it's going to continue to be one of the areas that we run into as a key challenge as we're trying to leverage GenAI,” Marino said.

Where the state’s workforce intersects with the rapidly evolving technology, panelists were quick to point out that workforce outreach has been a critical part of proof-of-concept projects. In addition to training, staff are also briefed on the implications of incoming technologies and how they could impact day-to-day operations.

Porat emphasized that any new technology will focus on enabling efficiencies rather than replacing state workers.

“The one thing that I love to brag about is the teams that are managing and leading the technical aspect of the sandbox are teams that manage our Linux and Unix apps. So the teams that are managing both our oldest applications at the state are also managing the most cutting-edge applications in the state at the same time,” Porat said.

*The State of Technology — California Industry Forum was hosted by Industry Insider — California.