TMF wants to ‘experiment’ with its own AI model

The Technology Modernization Fund may “experiment” with its own artificial intelligence model in the next fiscal year, acting Director Jessie Posilkin said Thursday.

TMF’s “tiny team” of eight within the General Services Administration is already all-hands-on-deck in managing and supporting the investments and proposals they have, she said. While the team has been using USAi, “there’s a ton of playing around we can do,” she said at GovExec’s Infrastructure and Modernization Forum in Reston, Va.

“I sort of flirted with this idea of … building some sort of model based on all of the TMF proposals that we’ve ever gotten and what’s happened with them,” Posilkin said. “I think, like any other agency team, I see a ton of opportunity for experimentation, and my goal for ‘27 is to get the capacity to start experimenting.”

The fund has been focusing on AI projects lately, like the State Department’s StateChat, which Posilkin said she was initially skeptical about because of the agency’s highly sensitive data.

“But that’s also the exact attitude that I think has led to sometimes government not taking important steps forward in using modern technology,” she said. 

Posilkin said State’s approach to mitigate risk with small pilots and extensive testing is the “exact approach you want to see. How can we use the newest and best tools, and also mitigate for the very real risk that when you are working in government, we are talking about actual public services that we don’t want to cause problems with?”