Consider, for example, how numerous federal agencies are collaborating today to
reexamine how they approach disaster response and preparedness. The biggest
challenges response teams face during a disaster are to quickly assess multiple
streams of information, establish real-time situational awareness, and effectively
coordinate and execute responses to limit damage, rescue survivors, and deliver
medical and other aid.
Agencies such as the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center
(JAIC), the military services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NASA, the State Department, NOAA,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Civil Air Patrol, the Department of
Energy and various academic institutions have been working to tackle these
challenges using AI-enabled tools and approaches.
Many of these organizations, for example, are partnering to develop an AI-enabled
flood and damage assessment that uses overhead imagery from aircraft and satellites
to identify areas where water should not be present and then assess damage based on
FEMA’s assessment categories. The assessment tool also uses overhead imagery to
locate road obstructions and identify routes to safely deliver supplies and remove
flood victims. The net effect of this will be to increase disaster resilience, save
lives, and lessen the impacts of disasters. The JAIC’s Humanitarian and Disaster
Relief team has already conducted a successful first test of a prototype with the
Indiana National Guard.
Working with the workforce
Such a capability can be a game-changer for government response teams in the future.
With this, responders can quickly combine numerous data streams—such as weather,
transportation, power grid, manpower, commerce, and satellite imagery data—to answer
critical questions, such as “where to place response teams during a disaster?”
“
Planners sought to develop entirely new approaches to addressing
complex mission challenges by allowing responders to engage with
richer information in new ways.
Kent said researchers are now taking this capability a step further to pose the
question, “How can we recover faster?”
“Where will there be trees and debris that need to be removed?” Kent said. “And what
is the workforce that we need to repair flood damage? So [we can] not only use the
capabilities to minimize impact, but to speed up recovery. So when you think about
this type of scenario, that fundamentally changes our end-to-end workforce. … So to
train our workforce, to leverage the powerful capabilities, we need not only the
commitment from the technical side, but [also] mission operations and the business
teams who understand and have the insights to help us identify, deconstruct, and
reconstruct some of those complex interactions.”
Planners of this effort were not interested in automating existing work
processes—instead, they sought to develop entirely new approaches to addressing
complex mission challenges by allowing responders to engage with richer information
in new ways. In this way, AI is expanding the capacities and capabilities of
government disaster response teams.
Too often, the conversation around AI occurs through a narrow and negative narrative
that machines and humans are in competition with each other. Instead, we should
acknowledge and build upon a different view where AI’s role is to enhance human
potential.
Rebalancing the Human + Machine Equation
Research involving 1,500 companies has found that firms achieve the greatest
performance improvements when humans and machines work together. Through their
interaction and collaboration, humans and AI can enhance each other’s complementary
strengths. For humans, those strengths include leadership, teamwork, creativity, and
social skills. Computers are best at speed, scalability, and quantitative
capabilities. For organizations to take full advantage of this collaboration, they
must understand how humans can most effectively augment machines, how machines can
bring out what humans do best, and, finally, how business processes can be
redesigned to support the partnership.
AI-empowered humans are overhauling claims processing
So what does it take for government agencies to start reimagining the work itself and
facilitate true human-AI collaboration? For one, they must think beyond a linear
“command and response” approach and, instead, create an interactive, exploratory,
and adaptable relationship. This requires an innovative set of practices that most
enterprises aren’t actively building today.
Automation requires replicating specific tasks to get a job done. Using AI for
augmentation, however, demands the ability to communicate and iterate with these
systems. To foster human and AI collaboration, businesses will need to explore and
master the tools and advancements that enable humans and machines to better engage
each other—for example, new breakthroughs in natural language processing that
translate into improved machine understanding of human speech and syntax.
Many commercial enterprises are also going down this path. Lemonade, a startup
natively designed to use human-AI collaboration to disrupt the insurance industry,
is one example with considerable applicability for customer-facing government
agencies. At Lemonade, AI is embedded in the organization and present in nearly
every workflow. In particular, the company’s claims payment process was designed to
play to the strength of AI and humans working together. Customers file claims with a
chatbot that both logs the claim details and instantly compares the claim to others
within the Lemonade database—a first wave of defense against fraud. If everything
looks okay, the claim can be paid out immediately to the customer. If a claim is too
complex or problematic, the AI shares the information with a human agent, who steps
in to manage the case.
Fraud and the administrative costs of complex bureaucracies are two of the largest
costs to insurance companies, and the company solves both by making AI a key part of
the process. Meanwhile, it also provides the customer with a simplified, seamless
insurance experience while making a human touchpoint available when it is needed.