How one Virginia county takes an ‘intentional’ and ‘intergenerational’ approach to AI
An intersection in Fairfax County, Virginia krblokhin via Getty Images
In Fairfax County, one local leader is building staff’s artificial intelligence skills now to ensure the workforce can keep up with tech advances in the future.
As social service agencies experience increasing workload demands with limited budgets and staff capacity, artificial intelligence is emerging as one solution to help employees get more done in less time.
Michael Becketts, director of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Department of Family Services, said AI helps him transcribe meetings, develop training programs for new hires and foster parents, summarize and review thousands of policy documents, and more, during a breakout session at the American Public Human Services Association’s National Human Services Summit this week in Philadelphia.
Using Google’s NotebookLM, for instance, Becketts drafted interview questions for a new child welfare social worker in the department — a task that can be time-consuming and require multiple staff members to complete.
“We don’t have a repository of interview questions,” he said, and “we don’t have a lot of managers and supervisors sitting around anymore trying to figure [it] out.”
Based on current department policies and job descriptions, Becketts said he prompted the AI tool to identify key roles and responsibilities for the position and generate a list of 20 questions that surveyed candidates’ knowledge, skill and ability.
Becketts said he has been working to get more of his staff and other agencies on board with incorporating AI into their everyday tasks. He said the department has already been using a closed AI tool that the county developed, which had more than 30,000 uses in the past nine months.
But Becketts said he recognizes that barriers like employees’ concerns over the tech’s impact on their jobs and residents’ data privacy could impede its adoption.
“As a leader who works and tries to educate people, one of the things that I’m always cognizant of is making sure that I’m not asking people to do too much too fast,” Becketts said. At the department, “we’re being slow and intentional,” he added.
Becketts pointed to a meeting last month of the Virginia League of Social Services Executives, a member organization for county social service leaders across the state, which aimed to “whet their appetite” for “harnessing [AI] tools to understand their efficacy,” he said.
During the session, officials learned what generative AI is and how it can be leveraged to support frontline workers and case managers in their work. Attendees also practiced how to craft prompts to maximize the potential of AI tool outputs and discussed how to leverage the tech responsibly to ensure equity and privacy in its deployment.
Building the current and future workforce’s comprehension and comfort with AI now is crucial for its successful adoption in the future, particularly as “the employees that we should be preparing for today are in high school,” Becketts said.
Government leaders must consider, “What is the work environment that we want to create for the people who we would want to work for us five to 10 years from now? And what is it going to take to create that workplace?” he said.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin last year, for instance, issued an executive order that created the state’s guidelines for integrating AI in education. It includes suggestions to “best prepare students with the skills to thrive in an AI-infused world on topics such as fostering ethical AI use and digital citizenship,” according to the guideline.
In Fairfax County, “we are definitely going to take a more intergenerational approach to really understand what people’s learning needs are and develop individualized learning journeys,” Becketts said in an interview with Route Fifty, pointing to the need to upskill and reskill today’s staff.
“The state’s not positioned right now to incorporate artificial intelligence into our tools — at some point they will,” he said after the session. The workshop helped get social service leaders “on the same page and curious about learning more, so that when it’s time to [have] that conversation, people aren’t scurrying around trying to figure” it out, Becketts added.