According to Selissen, speaking before the committee on Oct. 1, TxDOT has incorporated risk assessment guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) alongside an acceptable use policy and strong governance system. For TxDOT, this means putting every technology implementation through a risk review that questions its sustainability, the type of data it is consuming, what key systems it will need to be integrated with and what the integration process will require.
Selissen named multiple AI implementation initiatives that have expedited TxDOT processes:
- A 300-person trial of Microsoft’s Copilot that has improved employee efficiency and productivity
- A user access management system that has expedited onboarding and offboarding
- A program that has reduced manual invoice processing time from three weeks to 27 seconds
- An incident detection system that has sped up emergency response times and reduced secondary crashes by 29 percent
In its strategic plan for fiscal years 2025-29, TxDOT listed task automation as one of its top priorities. Selissen has been one of the more vocal state agency CIOs about her optimism toward AI implementation in the public sector, particularly for streamlining manual processes.
“I think there are some huge benefits from an optimization perspective, an efficiency perspective, that we want to seek to understand and how we can implement it effectively in the agency, especially from a transformation of transportation," Selissen said during her testimony. “We're seeing tangible progress as well as tangible benefits to the agency in saving from a manual labor perspective.”
The full committee meeting can be accessed on the Texas House of Representatives website.
