AI on the Front Lines of Public Service
Associate Professor Amanda Girth, left, leads the AI Salon in Washington, D.C., with panelists Adam Meyers of CrowdStrike (center) and Scott Deutchman of Google.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most transformative forces shaping government and public service today.
AI Salon Panelists
“This is not a distant horizon; it is a daily reality in how agencies operate, how policies are crafted, and how the public is served. Across the federal landscape, AI is already helping to analyze vast datasets, improve logistics, modernize contracting and strengthen cybersecurity,” said John Glenn College of Public Affairs Dean Trevor Brown. “But it is also challenging us to think carefully about ethics, transparency and the human elements of decision making. As many fear the loss of jobs from AI, we have to learn how to harness its power for the common good.”
To explore the mission-critical work of implementing AI, the Glenn College hosted the AI Salon, a conversation with AI industry leaders in Washington, D.C.
Scott Deutchman, head of U.S. AI strategy in government affairs and public policy at Google, and Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity provider, shared their expertise on the tools and strategies being used now to solve concrete challenges and improve operations in the federal government and supporting industries.
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“These leaders are defining what applied AI looks like in practice,” said Associate Professor Amanda Girth, director of Washington Programs at the Glenn College, who moderated the salon. “The conversation moved past hype to focus on what it actually takes to implement AI responsibly in public service, from building trust to aligning skills and tools with real mission needs. For our students and public servants alike, the takeaway was clear: Applied AI is about improving how government serves the public interest.”
Their insights provide AI guidance for not just federal agencies but also for public service professionals writ large. Here’s a sampling of what they shared.
Adam Meyers of CrowdStrike speaks with students in the Glenn College Washington Academic Internship Program (WAIP).
Meyers said from his perspective at CrowdStrike, AI helps cybersecurity experts keep up with ever-increasing data associated with threats.
“If we had this discussion eight months ago, my team was looking at 4.7 trillion events per day — 55,000,000 events per second. Today it’s at 5.7 trillion events per day and 65,000,000 events per second, so just in the course of about eight months that’s how much more data we’re looking at,” Meyers said. “And defenders are really struggling to keep pace with all the tools. We have something that we call Threat AI, which is our vision for how we do threat intelligence and security using AI.”
Threat AI helps cybersecurity analysts quickly switch their many hats, including malware analysis, threat modeling and incident response.
Scott Deutchman of Google says employees carve out time to play with AI to get comfortable with it and keep up with latest developments.
“It gets really expensive, and when you have to do it faster and more frequently every day, it starts to break a lot of the models that existed for the human,” Meyers said. “By bringing AI in, now we can offload that context switching, and we could offload a lot of that work.”
Deutchman gave an example of a solution Google found for health care. After the Department of Veterans Affairs released a report that 1.2 million veterans are being misdiagnosed with cancer every year, Google worked with the VA to create an Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM). The microscope improved the results of screenings exponentially, so much so that the VA now uses the ARM worldwide at its facilities.
That’s ultimately the way to get people energized and thinking about this.
AI is a tool that you will use in your career, which I think for a lot of people — most people — will be inevitable.
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“It’s thinking about AI creatively as a leader and setting an example,” Deutchman said.
“Effective leaders need to drink their own champagne, and they have to test,” Meyers said. “They have to — as you are doing with the Glenn College students — get employees to be AI fluent or knowledgeable,” Meyers said. “You have to get hands on the keyboard. You have to understand how the technology works, what it’s capable of and what its limitations are, and then apply that as you’re leading a team and managing an organization so that you have realistic expectations and realistic capabilities.”
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Meyers called AI an arms race as well as a national security, public safety and public health issue, and he fears lengthy discussions about regulation are taking time away from keeping up with the technology.
“Where I would like to see us go in the next 12 months is to go faster and to be able to be more agile in looking at AI: How can we adopt AI? Where can it be used across the federal government? How can we enable the use of AI rather than constraining it?” Meyers said. “If we start constraining it, I think we’re going to run into situations where we’re behind China and other countries.”
Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.