How Wisconsin’s economic development arm has embraced AI

In the never-ending contest between states to attract new businesses and company headquarters while ensuring their existing tenants stay put, Wisconsin’s economic development agency has looked to use artificial intelligence to accelerate its efforts.

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-public body that manages state and federal grant funds, looks to attract new businesses of all sizes and revitalize communities, among other roles, has spent the past year striving to understand how AI can help it meet its mission more efficiently.

And the agency has big plans for ways to use the technology, including standardizing its customer relationship platform, improving its data management, centralizing its IT support and deploying an AI-powered assistant to provide its staff with insights on call recordings, email drafts, context before meetings and a dashboard to track daily tasks. All these efforts are backed by Salesforce’s suite of tools, and represent a more efficient use of limited tax dollars for WEDC’s 155 staff.

“Any time you're deploying government funds, you have to be very cognizant of transparency and ensuring that it's going to the right people and doing the right thing,” said Joshua Robbins, WEDC’s senior vice president of business information and technology services. “We have a limited amount of funds; we have a limited amount of people. It's about, with our limited amount of resources, people and money, how can we take these funds and do the best thing we can get and provide taxpayers with return on investment, job creation loans for startups, things like that.”

One outward-facing change WEDC made is to open an online portal so applicants can track their grant awards, provide relevant paperwork and communicate with state officials, all in one place. The move away from paper applications came during the COVID-19 pandemic and has accelerated since, Robbins said. Online, recipients and staff get an “end to end guided workflow,” he added.

Now, WEDC’s customer relationship platform uses AI and an embedded AI assistant to help draft emails and other communications, summarize meetings and accomplish all manner of daily tasks that previously took time out of employees’ days. The system can also help track leads, manage accounts and take on other tasks.

The AI assistant, Salesforce’s Einstein AI chatbot, also offers access to WEDC’s resources and information, and pulls it up for staff quickly using generative AI. Many states and cities are turning to generative AI to help act as a quick-reference knowledge base, and Robbins said even unsuccessful queries can help add to that repository.

“We have a lot of things written, we have all this stuff done that we have stored for people to go reference,” he said. “But this way, when clients are in the middle of an application, or when clients are having a problem with something, they have something that they can just ask. If AI can't solve it, we'll create a ticket that will be attached to where they're having a problem, and then we can use AI to generate more resources.”

It will all be grounded in various data collected by WEDC, including Census data, tax information, property records and more. Data enrichment powered by AI will help provide staff with relevant information at their fingertips when they go into meetings, rather than have them learn everything themselves as part of their preparation.

Understanding how WEDC does business has been crucial in integrating AI, Robbins said. It’s taken a long time to understand workflows and the knowledge it holds, but without doing that heavy work up front, using new technology would have been much harder, he said.

“You have to have a really good understanding, because you're trying to augment that critical path of understanding of who you are,” Robbins said. “Your business, who your business is, is the process of what you do. If you have a very good understanding, then it's easy to understand how AI could help here, what questions do we have here, what’s tripping people up here, what knowledge we can transfer here. And honestly, what can we automate?”

Robbins said he has already talked to his counterparts in several other states about replicating WEDC’s approach, and it is doable. However, he warned that state agencies should first look to understand their existing business processes, as WEDC has, as well as what they want to achieve and how AI can help that mission.

“You don't want to go buy a tool, or you don't want to go do something with AI, without already having a strategy in place to address the processes that are critical to the success of your organization,” Robbins said. “An organization is built on process. It is the things that you do every day towards the large or the smaller into the larger goals. If you're going to buy AI tools, have a plan.”