How Google’s Rapid Innovation Team uses AI to quickly solve governments’ problems
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By
Chris Teale
A small team will typically deploy within an agency and, over the course of six weeks, build a solution in what is a far quicker process than usual procurement. Results already suggest its methods are working.
New York City has embraced artificial intelligence to help inspect its subway tracks, while New Hampshire’s push to modernize its benefits program has also used AI to speed up claims and streamline the application process.
While these two initiatives affect two very different aspects of residents’ lives, one aspect they share is the help they received getting them off the ground, which was driven in large part by Google Public Sector’s Rapid Innovation Team.
Spun up within the Google arm that looks to help governments at all levels find new solutions to their biggest problems, the Rapid Innovation Team looks to do so quickly and with a custom AI solution in less than 90 days, before governments commit to a contract. Agencies partner with the Rapid Innovation Team to build a working prototype to solve a specific problem in a secure environment in weeks, sometimes days.
It's a major reimagining of the government IT procurement process, which can sometimes take months or even years to deliver prototypes or products. And while it may seem daunting to solve some of governments’ biggest challenges, Google leaders said they must be up for the task.
“If you're not doing things that are crazy, you're doing the wrong things,” said Cameron Groves, Google Public Sector’s director of rapid innovation. “That's what we aim to look for.”
Typically, the Rapid Innovation Team assembles what Groves called a “small but mighty group” of three people, which includes a project manager and two full stack developers. Over the course of six weeks, they will work with government agency officials to identify the challenge they face, undertake a series of workshops to help build a potential solution, test it and then slowly roll it out as a pilot before full implementation.
And the results have already been notable. In New York City, a prototype effort that retrofitted standard Google Pixel smartphones to subway cars along one line to capture vibrations and sound patterns through built-in sensors and microphones identified 92% of track defect locations that had been identified by inspectors. That initial pilot along the “A” line saw smartphones collect 335 million sensor readings, 1 million GPS locations and 1,200 hours of audio, which was then combined with the city’s database and ingested by a Google Cloud-based machine learning tool and analyzed.
And for New Hampshire Employment Security, the agency that coordinates benefits and other services for state residents, they turned to the Rapid Innovation Team to help them adjudicate unemployment insurance claims using AI, tweak questions to better understand residents’ eligibility and then provide a full summary for the human adjudicator so they can make a better-informed decision on whether an applicant should receive benefits.
For New Hampshire, while they have continually modernized their system, having this extra push through the Rapid Innovation Team has helped them iterate constantly and improve their workflows.
“We continue to improve the experience for customers and for our own staff and how they go about their daily activities,” Deputy Commissioner of Employment Security Richard Lavers told Route Fifty in an interview earlier this year. “That's the challenge now: constantly improving it so we don't sit back and just become complacent with what we've done.”
Google Public Sector also partnered with the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan to release an agentic AI virtual teaching assistant, which provides students with access to personalized round-the-clock support. Being able to deliver quick results and then replicating it elsewhere is key, Groves said.
“A pattern here is really leading from the middle by execution, quickly delivering results, having impact to customers and partners, and then from there, scaling it out, then moving on to the next thing that's emerging in the marketplace,” he said. “That's really the philosophy of myself and the leadership team here at the Rapid Innovation Team.”