The state announced the arrival of “Responsible AI for Public Professionals: Using Generative AI at Work” July 3; it’s a free course created by and for public-sector professionals, to support the understanding and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in government.
Launched by InnovateUS, a nonprofit, multi-state initiative from the team at the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, and The Governance Lab (GovLab), it’s aimed at informing state employees on AI — but is available to all public-sector professionals.
Center and GovLab Director Beth Simone Noveck, an AI leader in nonprofits and the public sector, said a common theme InnovateUS heard from public-sector professionals as it designed the course was “the desperate need for introduction and familiarization.”
Noveck is New Jersey’s first chief AI strategist, but discussed the course with Government Technology in her capacity as director. She was part of the team that helped design and execute the course, she said, but emphasized its creation was made possible by input from more than 100 stakeholders in academia and the private and public sectors.
“It really was a massive collaborative effort to ensure that we were creating something that was really for public servants and that would be responsive to what people felt they wanted and needed,” Noveck said. She explained that people have read and hypothesized about how the use of AI tools might impact them, but what is often lacking is the actual practice of using these tools.
Earlier this year, InnovateUS released results of a multi-month engagement process, revealing a desire among public professionals for both baseline and specialized training in using AI. AI training models are increasingly being launched at the state level in places like New Jersey and Oklahoma to combat a need for AI skills in broader digital skills training efforts.
This new course offers hands-on applications of various tools. Its design, notably, is platform-agnostic and participants can experience demos on platforms including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. This was an intentional decision, because government entities have different rules and needs for AI tools. The course does not suggest one tool is better than another, but rather shares the general principles around how one can work with these kinds of tools.
With the AI landscape rapidly evolving, course content is intended to be living and agile; the team plans to update it every six months — sooner, if needed.
“Just from where we were a year ago to where we are now, there have been so many changes in the power of these models that we know we will need to update this,” Noveck said.
For agencies with limited capacity or resources that have not yet been able to dive into AI, the course can offer an entry point, she said, to better understanding the purpose of GenAI tools and potential government applications: “This is partly meant to help satisfy some of that curiosity and answer that question: why should my agency and its employees be using these tools?”
Next to the Internet, Noveck said AI is the technology with the most transformative power she has seen in her lifetime. And for government officials, she said there is an inherent responsibility to be critical evaluators of both risk and opportunity with emerging technologies — while serving as key regulators of AI. But to effectively regulate these new technologies, it is imperative to first understand how they are used.
“I think it's incumbent upon us as public professionals to serve the public interest, and anything that can help us to do that is something we should be evaluating and exploring,” Noveck said.
For participants who take this course and want to further educate themselves on the topic, InnovateUS will be launching another course, which is expected to be public in late August. The first course, Noveck said, is designed to answer the question at an individual level, exploring how tools with AI can enhance productivity. The second course will build on this foundation, exploring how AI can be scaled within an organization.
InnovateUS also hosts live workshops twice weekly on technology topics including AI. Another offering for those that have taken this AI course is a coaching program, set to launch “very soon,” according to Noveck. The hope for all these resources, she said, is to create an “ecosystem of learning.”