State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Artificial Intelligence: The Next Big Thing in Government

Governing: The Las Vegas health department typically selects at random the restaurants it will inspect. But earlier this year, it tried something new. The agency used a software program to analyze tens of thousands of tweets in order to identify possible food poisonings. The program then connected those tweets to specific restaurants and dispatched inspectors to check for any health violations.

The Las Vegas experiment resulted in citations in 15 percent of inspections compared to just 9 percent when inspections were random. The new approach, which saved the agency time and money, was essentially a form of artificial intelligence, or cognitive computing. Unlike big data and analytics, which work off structured data that takes time to collect and analyze, this program was able to quickly calculate possible health problems by reading unstructured data -- words and phrases. That’s an exciting advance in computing capability, and it’s something that experts and state and local CIOs alike see as the next big thing in government technology.

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