Maryland partners with tech companies to build an AI-ready workforce
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The cross-sector collaboration will help state workers design and develop AI solutions that fit into Maryland’s broader goals of expanding AI adoption across agencies, one official said.
Maryland is tapping artificial intelligence as a tool against some of the state’s most pressing challenges, like poverty, housing access and public benefit administration, with the ultimate goal of improving service delivery and modernizing employees’ workflows. A new cross-sector partnership with two tech companies is aimed at helping Maryland achieve those goals while building an AI-ready workforce.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore announced last month that certain state departments — Maryland Benefits, the Department of Labor, the governor’s Innovation Team and the Department of the Environment — will collaborate with Anthropic and Percepta to empower state employees to adopt and leverage AI solutions that enhance how residents and staff interact with government services.
Under the partnership, state employees will have access to Anthropic’s Claude AI tool and receive technical assistance to design and deploy AI initiatives, such as developing a virtual assistant that can help residents apply for benefits and track applications, state officials said in the statement. Experts from Percepta will also assist state employees with developing AI-enabled solutions for improving the state’s licensing and permitting efficiency.
Ultimately, “we want to improve constituent outcomes” and AI can serve as a tool to enable staff to “do their work more rapidly and quickly,” said Nishant Shah, Maryland’s senior advisor for responsible AI.
But that progress largely depends on how well state staff are prepared to understand and leverage AI technology. The partnership can help the state do that, while also supporting Maryland’s goal of increasing development and implementation of AI, which was outlined in the state’s AI strategy and roadmap released earlier this year, Shah said.
The roadmap underscores five pillars to support the development and implementation of AI across state operations: maturing the state’s data governance; strengthening data foundations; supporting experimentation and adoption of AI tech; improving the state workforce’s AI knowledge and studying the state’s approach to AI in critical domains, from health care service delivery to public safety.
Anthropic and Percepta’s efforts are meant to help the state make progress on two pillars in particular — experimenting with and adopting AI technology and improving the state’s “AI IQ,” Shah said.
By leveraging Claude technology, for instance, Shah said Maryland staff can “unlock new [AI] capabilities when building out benefit systems for our innovation [and labor] team,” he explained.
Percepta’s technical expertise and assistance can further help state staff determine how and where AI can be applied to their workflows, and transition those ideas from experimentation to production, Shah said.
He pointed to the state’s licensing and permitting functions as an example where staff can leverage the partnership to follow the state’s AI strategy and roadmap. With more than 1,300 licenses and permits available in the state, staff can evaluate where AI can help streamline or expedite parts of the application or approval process, Shah explained.
The state’s strategic plan and recent partnership with Anthropic and Percepta will help inform Maryland’s AI approach to AI moving forward, Shah said. State leaders could, for example, consider how to tie AI literacy efforts to other jobs like procurement or human resources officials.
“We need to empower workers to understand whether [a] workflow is a good candidate to apply AI to, and they need to have a good understanding of both the risks and opportunities of applying [the tech,]” Shah said.