New Jersey uses AI as a tool to boost resident and staff experiences
ATHVisions via Getty Images
A new report from the state highlights how AI is helping the state improve service delivery for residents for critical resources like food assistance and unemployment insurance.
The Garden State’s efforts to increasingly weave AI into its operations are part of state leaders’ goal to improve residents’ lives through technology, said Dave Cole, chief innovation officer for New Jersey.
A new report released last week from the New Jersey Office of Innovation highlights the state’s efforts over the last year to simplify and streamline how residents access government services and how AI is driving those improvements.
“With the changes in federal policy over the summer, a lot more of the burden on delivering services is going to fall on the states,” Cole said. Services like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for example, are subject to changes in eligibility and enrollment rules under H.R. 1, putting millions of Americans at risk of losing their benefits.
Efforts to implement innovative solutions like AI “are the kinds of techniques that actually help a state respond quickly to changing policy, whether they’re federal, coming from the state or just the realities of people needing more services,” he said.
This past year, for example, the Office of Innovation used AI to identify approximately 100,000 additional children who were eligible for the state’s Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer program, the federal service that administers $120 in grocery assistance to low-income families over the summer. It is now called SUN Bucks.
Using databases from partners like the state’s Department of Children and Families, Department of Education, Department of Agriculture and the Department of Human Services, the Office of Innovation leveraged AI to match public assistance records across the agencies to identify children who were enrolled in other programs like SNAP but not SUN Bucks, Cole explained.
Those families were then automatically issued cards with money on them for grocery shopping. Ultimately, the number of additional eligible children represented 14% of total enrollees and totaled more than $24 million in benefits, according to the report.
Doing this work manually would otherwise “require going through hundreds of thousands, potentially, of records across all programs,” Cole said. “There’s probably over a million different records, and trying to find patterns [in them] is going to be prohibitive, so the technology really enabled this kind of work,” he explained.
AI is also helping the state address challenges in daily services like call center interactions between staff and residents. The tech is being used to optimize how callers navigate the menu, reach dispatchers more quickly and call residents back more efficiently.
As of August, the AI-supported system has reduced call wait times from 40 minutes to under two minutes across 13 state agencies, Cole said. The New Jersey Division of Unemployment Insurance, for example, experienced a 15% increase in the number of callers who were able to connect with an agent, according to the report.
The state’s work to improve resident and staff experiences with AI is helping New Jersey emerge as a leader in the technology, and officials have released guidance and open-source resources to support other states’ AI initiatives, the report stated.
Indeed, the civic tech nonprofit Code for America identified New Jersey as one of three states that are “advanced” in AI-readiness in a report released July.
“Having services that work in government is a fundamental way to rebuild trust with the population and make sure that as things get more complicated in life for people — they go through hard times, whether that's losing a job, needing training, losing access to health care — that they have a government there that is dependable,” Cole said.
Editor's Note: This story was updated Nov. 20 to correct details about New Jersey's call center modernization efforts.