The Future of Government with AI and Emerging Tech
Tyler Podcast Episode 93, Transcript
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Show Notes
On this episode of The Tyler Tech Podcast, Vivek Mehta, Vice President and General Manager, Platform Solutions Division at Tyler Technologies, explores the critical challenges facing modern organizations and governments in today's tech-driven world. From streamlining processes to boosting productivity and enhancing resident engagement, Vivek shares his expertise on navigating the complex intersection of technology and workforce dynamics, shedding light on the role of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies in shaping the future of government operations.
We also look ahead to Connect 2024, which will be in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 19th to May 22nd. Registration is now open at: www.tylertech.com/connect
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Transcript
Vivek Mehta: The realization and acceptance that AI is not here to replace anybody's job.
AI, in fact, is here, to make you more intelligent, to help you focus on tasks that actually matter, like a next Flint, Michigan, crisis should not happen, or a bridge collapse in Florida that happened should never happen. Right? That's where we want to spend our time. And I believe that AI is right for government agencies to take advantage of and focus on the bigger, broader issues.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, it's The Tyler Tech Podcast, your source for insightful conversations with thought leaders addressing the pressing issues in our communities. I'm Josh Henderson, and I'm on the corporate marketing team here at Tyler. Thanks for joining us. In each episode, we dive into the essential topics shaping our society and shed light on the individuals, places, and technologies empowering the public sector.
If you like what you hear, please consider giving us a five-star rating and review, subscribing on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and recommending the show to others.
On today's episode, we're joined by Tyler's Vice President and General Manager of the Platform Solutions Division, Vivek Mehta. Vivek offers his insights on the pressing issues facing modern organizations and governments as they navigate the ever-evolving landscape of technology and workforce dynamics. He also explores artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and the ways in which they're shaping the future of government operations.
Vivek helps demystify AI while showcasing its potential to streamline processes, boost productivity, enhance fraud detection, and improve resident engagement in the public sector. He has a wealth of knowledge with a remarkable career story. So, without further ado, let's get into my conversation with Vivek Mehta. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Alright, Vivek. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Tyler Tech Podcast.
Vivek Mehta: Super excited to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks for having me.
Josh Henderson: Of course. Of course. We're excited to get this conversation started. So, I wanted to start off by sort of diving into your professional background a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your career journey. What are some of the things you've done along the way that led you to your current role here at Tyler?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah. Absolutely. I think, since graduating from Virginia Tech with a computer engineering degree, which seems, oh, forever ago, I've spent the last two decades working with various federal, state, and local agencies, help them implement systems, spanning from case management to help with their back offices stuff, building online portals to serve their constituents, as well as building large database, data warehouses, to help them with their business intelligence needs.
And as I was climbing the corporate ladder, you know, a catalyst event occurred that I think still remains near and dear to my heart. It was the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. I don't know if you recall, but what really got to me was the 8,000 kids who had lead poisoning, that eventually, led to impact on their brains. And, as I digested that, you know, I had my own Jerry Maguire moment, not as intense as sweating in a hotel room somewhere, but definitely got me thinking.
And, as I looked more and more into some of the problems that our communities faced, the conclusion overall was, if you take our country's aging infrastructure, add to it the man made and natural disasters that we have been experiencing more and more of over the last decade, it poses great risk to our communities and our environment overall.
At the same time, what I realized is the people in charge of protecting those communities and our environment, at best, are out there with digital forms that they're filling out, or at worst, they're out there with pen and paper with not any intelligence at all. So, I decided to do something about that. I founded my own firm called ARInspect, and at the core of it was an AI and machine learning algorithm that not only allowed them to be more productive out in the field using things like route optimizations, ChatGPT based technology, things like that, but it also provided them intelligence to be proactive rather than reactive in preventing these kind of issues.
And when we started talking to Tyler, you know, they sort of had me at their connected communities vision about building prosperous communities and making sure that we are serving the constituents in the right way. Honestly, that's where the mission aligned, and we quickly realized that with Tyler's reach and their impact to an already existing large government ecosystem, our technology can team up with that large base and provide even a bigger impact. So, that's how I ended up here.
Josh Henderson: It's so interesting. It's, you know, it's a such a wide-ranging career path.
And I think it's important to emphasize the experience you have both in creating solutions and on the business side as well. You've obviously seen a lot. But I'm curious, you know, from a current day perspective, what are the biggest challenges organizations face in terms of workforce dynamics and meeting public expectations for digital services?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah. I think, this has been a sort of a long, long-standing conversation, especially in the public sector world.
If you look at the landscape, majority of the government workforce, they have either retired or are on their way to retirement.
And that poses two big problems for agencies nowadays.
First and foremost, loss of that institutional knowledge.
To give you an example, right? I'm Bob, I've been an inspector for 20 years, and I go inspect Rob's Spicy Chicken every year, right? And I know where Rob hides all the skeletons. So, when me, as Bob, is going out there, I already know what to look for because I have that institutional knowledge.
But now, as Bob, if I'm retiring, the next person up may or may not have that knowledge depending on the systems in place. So, that's what I mean when I talk about institutional knowledge. Another big impact to that is just do more with less. Because, as the workforce is retiring, they're having trouble finding one-to-one replacement because the younger generation doesn't want to work on pen and paper. They want the latest and greatest technology to be efficient at the work that they are doing. So, as the workforce is retiring, as they are having hard time recruiting new talent, and then mix into it the institutional loss of knowledge, it does pose, according to me, as the greatest challenge that the public sector's agencies are facing nowadays.
Josh Henderson: Now let's dive into the latest and greatest in technology a little bit further. You're obviously well versed in the world of artificial intelligence.
How do you personally perceive the role of AI and emerging technologies in addressing these types of challenges and enhancing government operations?
Vivek Mehta: So, let's dissect that a little bit, right? The word AI and machine learning gets thrown around a lot nowadays.
But if you just look at it as, AI is too broad to make any impact because that's where people get lost. So, we at Tyler are looking at AI, how AI can help government in three major focus areas.
The first and foremost being productivity.
Is it increasing productivity, which in turn addresses the challenge that we spoke about of doing more with less and less.
The second key area we are focusing on is decision making.
Speaking to my earlier comment about being proactive rather than reactive.
Also, that decision making can serve as a replacement of the loss of institutional knowledge, that most of the agencies are experiencing. So, how can AI help in automating, giving them insights that they otherwise wouldn't have?
And the third one, and quite frankly, the most important one to most of our clients is the service delivery, right? How do you continue to provide better and better digital services to their constituents?
And I believe it you know; we'll talk a little bit about the examples and stuff. But those are the three areas we think that the AI technology can help in the public sector.
Josh Henderson: Yeah, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, those three very specific areas that you're referring to. I'm curious what specific areas within government agencies do you see as sort of ripe for AI integration and modernization?
And furthermore, how do you envision AI assisting government employees in their, you know, in their daily tasks and responsibilities?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. So, again, like I said, right, let's take the broad AI definition out of it and talk about what most of our clients do.
Right? How are most of our clients organized? They have a back-office operation where the majority of the applications that they are getting of all different types, they have to process them, they have to review them, and they have to issue some kind of decision on it, right? So, if you just take the back-office, a few examples could be, lots of agencies, even in today's date, get paper applications. Somebody is spending time to input that data into some sort of system.
Then the reviewer comes in doing a whole bunch of manual reviews on stuff.
With AI solutions nowadays, you can actually scan that paper form and automatically digest all of that information into your system.
After that, the machine learning models can actually review and automate some of the reviewer tasks. Again, we are not talking about replacing human beings, entirely.
Rather, we are talking about augmenting their productivity, to increase their productivity and getting them the help they need to perhaps clear the backlog. So, back-office is one such big area. The second big area which what the company I founded did was help the field workers that are out there, right? Think about, I think, one of the cities we were talking to earlier, they had about one inspector per 1,000 restaurants that they needed to inspect.
Like, how do you do that in a year? Well, you can't do it. So, can machine learning models help figure out, out of the thousand restaurants, which ones possess the highest risk?
Let's be smart about deploying our limited resources to the right places to provide the biggest impact.
So, that's sort of the second sort of area where government can use AI. And lastly is the service delivery. Again, right, lots of governments have done a great job building online portals to enable those digital services.
Yet, sort of the consensus, if you if you do a survey as a citizen, sometimes it could be clunky. Sometimes the regulations are too complicated.
So, how do we provide them help with the use of chatbot, for example, to answer their own questions, to make their experience much better and seamless, with the government entities?
So, those are sort of the three examples, and, obviously, you know, we are coming up with new AI use cases at a very, very rapid pace.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. And I think once government agencies start to see a bigger sample size of the ways in which these efficiencies are happening, I think there will be a lot more buy in, long term. But, you know, obviously, there's a considerable amount of hesitation when it comes to AI, implementing solutions that utilize AI.
What are the primary concerns or barriers hindering the adoption of AI technologies within government? Or, how should we be demystifying AI, which is still such a misunderstood but, you know, much discussed part of modern tech?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
In my opinion, honestly, I think it starts with a simple realization that AI is not there to replace us.
In my opinion, honestly, I think it starts with a simple realization that AI is not there to replace us. Rather, AI needs to be thought of as the enabler to get rid of the monotonous, the tedious, repeatable tasks.
Vivek Mehta
Vice President and General Manager, Platform Solutions Division
Right, in any fashion. Rather, AI needs to be thought of as the enabler to get rid of the monotonous, the tedious, repeatable tasks.
How can that, AI can take that off our plate so we can focus on more complex and more impactful tasks.
And I'll take that even a step further. How can AI provide me the intelligence and insights I need to execute those complex tasks more efficiently? Once the agency has that realization, AI is no longer a black box, right?
You're much more open to exploring how can I help Bob here not retain all that knowledge in his brain, but utilize AI models to augment his intelligence when he is out in the field? So, to me, it all comes down to, hey, let's break down this world of AI and first and foremost admit to ourselves that it's not here to replace anybody.
It's here to make us more intelligent. It's here to help us focus on tasks that truly matter.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We'll be right back with more of The Tyler Tech Podcast.
Jade Champion: I hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of The Tyler Tech Podcast. My name is Jade Champion, and I'm here with Breanna Case to talk all things Tyler Connect 2024 in Indianapolis from May 19th to May 22nd.
Breanna Case: That's right, Jade. Our annual user conference is quickly approaching, and there's still time to register if you haven't already.
Jade Champion: And we have so much planned for this year, from special events to amazing speakers and plenty of networking opportunities. What are some highlights for 2024?
Breanna Case: We are really excited about some of the speakers we have coming to this stage. This year, you'll get to hear from best-selling author and FutureThink CEO, Lisa Bodell, chef and author Jeff Henderson, as well as Black Ambition CEO, Felecia Hatcher.
Jade Champion: I also heard comedian Leanne Morgan will be performing at our Client Appreciation Event. We hope you're just as excited as we are to join us in Indy, where we're expecting over 5,000 attendees and more than 800 sessions including product training and general education classes. If you still need to register, now's the time. Go to tylertech.com/connect. Now let's get back to The Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: You know, we've talked a lot about how AI will affect the workforce or how it can affect the workforce in a positive way. But, obviously, with the public sector, with government agencies, it's outward facing. It's how do we how do we help our residents? What's the resident experience look like? How would you say agencies ensure that the adoption of AI technologies aligns with the goals and the values of local communities and its residents?
Vivek Mehta: So, this is where agencies will need to sort of take a step back and figure out where their challenges are, okay?
AI, as much as is discussed right now, pretty much every offering in the market, you'll hear, oh, we have AI this, and we have AI that. Now what that has done for government agencies is it's just become overwhelming.
Right? And the response to that overwhelming feeling is, either the agency will try to do everything in one shebang. Let's go full AI.
Or the other extreme, we don't understand it. We don't think it will help. Let's not do anything with it. To combat that and to get through that, I believe that agencies should identify their challenges first. Do they have a huge backlog in processing the application?
Or, no, we don't have a backlog in processing the application. We actually have a backlog in reviewing the applications that come in. Maybe the intake and the review is streamlined already, our problem is in the final decision making.
Or no, no, our decision making is fine too, but it's taking forever for our inspectors to go conduct the inspection so we can issue a final license or permit. Once you identify the bottleneck areas, it's only then the agencies can target, okay, I need AI and ML solution to do this for me.
Right? And that sort of does a couple of things, right? It gets rid of the overwhelmingness that I talked about. At the same time, it will help agencies prioritize, right?
I walked through this simple scenario, but challenges could be in more than one area. So okay, well, where is the biggest backlog? Where is the biggest bottleneck? Let's prioritize that. And once you start to do that, it sort of starts to bring this vast world of AI into focus use for that agency.
And that will enable progress rather than just overwhelming feeling or trying to do everything at once.
Josh Henderson: That's great. And I think this next question sort of touches a little bit on some of the things we've already discussed, but kind of want to dive a little bit deeper into it. But, you know, what potential risks or ethical considerations do you foresee in the integration of AI into particularly into government operations, and how should we be addressing those?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah. You know, so I'm going to dissect the world of AI again, right? There are certain parts of AI just like simple task automation where ethics are not involved.
I think you're just simply automating the task and allowing your resources to do better things. But then you look at things like generative AI, and there's absolutely ethical questions that we have to worry about. Now good news, Josh, is that we are too late in being responsible on the social media side, right?
Whether all these social media's app that the technology people are developing, are we being responsible? Or are our kids being addicted to them and what impact are they having? It came much later.
Good news about AI is companies like Microsoft already have chief AI responsible people assigned to it right now. As they dive and dive into more into research, they are saying, we are going to be responsible about doing this. And more and more as government adapts to this, you'll see the same kind of role within the government organizations as well. Because there is part of AI, that we have to be mindful of where we are not crossing the boundary, ethical boundaries, to be specific.
Josh Henderson: This has been such a great conversation, Vivek. We really appreciate all the insights. But now as we start to wrap up the conversation and as these technologies, you know, continue to advance at such a rapid pace, I thought it would be important to sort of look ahead a little bit. How do you envision the future of government operations with AI playing a central role, particularly in terms of workforce sustainability and service delivery?
Vivek Mehta: I think, look, I'll take you back to the challenges that the government agencies are currently facing, right? With the retiring workforce, their, sort of limited ability to attract new talents.
If you take a look at those challenges, to me, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And in order for government agencies to successfully adopt the latest and greatest technology, I think they do need to take a look at their own challenges first and find targeted solutions to get rid of those overwhelming feelings when it comes to this vast world of AI and ML. So, that that's what I'll say, prioritize, prioritize, prioritize, and then look for a solution that helps you fix priority number one, two, and so on.
Josh Henderson: That's great. And now, you know, can you leave us with some final thoughts on what you believe the approach should be for future proofing local government and leveraging technology for the public good?
Vivek Mehta: Yeah, I think it's a combination of all the things we talked about honestly on the call, Josh. But most importantly, I will say again, that the realization, acceptance that AI is not here to replace anybody's job.
AI, in fact, is here, to make you more intelligent, to help you focus on tasks that actually matter, like a next Flint, Michigan, crisis should not happen, or a bridge collapse in Florida that happened should never happen, right? That's where we want to spend our time. And I believe that AI is right for government agencies to take advantage of and focus on the bigger, broader issues.
Josh Henderson: I think that's the perfect place to end it, Vivek. Thank you again so much for joining us today and hope to have you back on the show again soon.
Vivek Mehta: Absolutely. Thanks, Josh. It was a great conversation. Thanks.
Josh Henderson: Thanks so much.
Josh Henderson: I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Vivek Mehta. If you'd like to learn more about the benefits of digital solutions and other topics discussed throughout the episode, check out our show notes for more resources.
A modern digital infrastructure allows the public sector to adapt in the digital age. From operational agility to data management and analytics, as well as cost savings, security, compliance, and scalability, governments are poised to take advantage of innovative technology to create more efficiencies in their systems and better support and connect their communities.
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For Tyler Technologies, I'm Josh Henderson. Thanks for joining The Tyler Tech Podcast.