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David Shive is GSA\u2019s chief information officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started with 10 users, and then we moved to 100 users, and then 1,000 users, and eventually rolled it out to all employees across GSA,\u201d said David Shive, GSA\u2019s chief information officer<\/a>, in an interview with Federal News Network. \u201cThe business portfolio of GSA is very broad, and they started to apply this thing across those broad business domains. They started to do things like writing code that would satisfy some code development needs that they had completed in hours, not days, weeks or months. They started doing data analytics across multiple data sets, that would normally take days and weeks, and they were doing it in hours.\u201d<\/p>\n Shive said the employees really started to show the impact of the USAi tool during Friday demonstrations last spring led by Stephen Ehikian, then the acting administrator and now deputy administrator.<\/p>\n ]]><\/p>\n Shive said 60% or 70% of those demonstrations were employees using USAi to \u201cautomate or augment the work that they were doing by reducing the drudgery of their day-to-day work, or making it so they didn\u2019t need to swivel between five systems to do one thing or they\u2019re writing code snippets to automate the drudgery of their work day.\u201d<\/p>\n GSA is offering USAi as a no-cost shared service.<\/p>\n Agencies just have to sign a memorandum of understanding with GSA and determine what databases they want to integrate with the large language models.<\/p>\n Shive said agency customers will have access to USAi through a GSA-hosted single tenant cloud environment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t need to be in the business of running other agencies\u2019 technology, not because we would be bad at it, but because the business mission of each agency is very different. The risk profile of each agency is very different. It doesn\u2019t make sense to have a one-size-fits-all for everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve developed a multi-tenant architecture where each tenant, the underlying infrastructure, is all the same, but each tenant is independent. Each agency has full control over the entire stack, including things like the provisioning of their users, assessing that telemetry and those behavior patterns across people and technology, and making risk management framework based decisions on what\u2019s acceptable to them and what\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n Access to six commercial AI models<\/p>\n Shive said several agencies are already interested in using the platform, but he wasn\u2019t ready to say who or how many.<\/p>\n Through USAi, GSA is offering three different options and access to six different commercial AI large language models, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Open AI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n ]]><\/p>\n One of the services is a basic chatbot.<\/p>\n The second is the API layer to make it easier to integrate their datasets into the chatbot. \u201cThe connections and the mechanics and stuff are the same for every tenant, but how they configure those is up to each agency to determine,\u201d Shive said.<\/p>\n The third service is the console, which is a management dashboard that lets each agency tailor the tooling and the create user requirements based on things like risk tolerance.<\/p>\n Shive said USAi received its authority to operate at the FISMA moderate level.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea there is that we built something in what we call a model garden. The idea there is that not all models are the same. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, and we want agencies to be able to get access to whatever model they need that they think is suitable for the work that they\u2019re trying to do,\u201d he said. \u201cAlso knowing that those strengths and weaknesses are leapfrogging themselves on a very rapid pace, it is a wildly dynamic industry environment out there, this gives agencies the ability to try before they buy at scale. In that rapidly changing, highly dynamic space, they are able to point whatever work they\u2019re trying to do at the highest value model. Value can be defined any number of ways. It\u2019s not just cost. It\u2019s usability, resistance to bias, resistance to cyber attack and other things. We give them unfettered, full visibility into that telemetry, and then they can make the decisions based on whatever their internal criteria is because that is the domain of chief information officers to make those decisions at the agency level. We just give them the tools to be able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n