During Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) about using artificial intelligence to help federal employees.
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00:00I will now recognize Mr. Khanna for five minutes.
00:04Thank you Madam Chair. I appreciate the testimony.
00:08Mr. Shah, of course you have been such a successful
00:12entrepreneur and leader in Silicon Valley. I appreciate your
00:16being here. So I'll answer my first question
00:20to you. How do you think AI
00:24can help particularly government employees
00:28do better and be more effective
00:32in their work? Yeah, thank you.
00:36You know, the things
00:40that we're seeing in the private sector today with large organizations
00:44like Honeywell and like, you know, Northrop Grumman
00:48and the likes, they're benefiting from AI by making
00:52their employees be able to self-serve, get information that they're
00:56looking for and take actions across a variety
00:58of systems. You know, on any given
01:00day an employee might have to swivel their chair
01:02seventeen times to use different
01:04tools and that
01:06becomes a very wasteful
01:08portion of their day, sometimes many
01:10hours. And so to the extent that
01:12we can start to do that
01:14for federal workers,
01:16for all folks
01:18who work for this government, I think
01:20we're going to see some benefits. Benefits that will allow them
01:24to troubleshoot, to have better
01:26IT. Benefits that will
01:28accrue to them from an HR
01:30perspective in terms of
01:32getting the information they need, making the
01:34changes, the benefit selections that go
01:36into that. And also be able
01:38to work across different
01:40systems without having to be
01:42an expert. I think one of the things that
01:44you all have pointed out, there's hundreds
01:46hundreds of enterprise systems
01:48inside the government, and you may only
01:50touch it once a year, twice a year.
01:52And so if you can use AI as
01:54the overlay, kind of that front door,
01:56what you'll see is your
01:58staff and all the members
02:00of the federal government be able to
02:02navigate these systems,
02:04which can be very complex very easily,
02:06using the most intuitive interface
02:08in the world, which is language and
02:10conversation. So when it
02:12comes to that, you know, we've seen
02:14companies in our
02:16sort of world of private
02:18sector be able
02:20to reclaim, top five
02:22pharmaceutical was able to reclaim
02:2475,000 hours of employee
02:26productivity by deploying
02:28this kind of AI across
02:3044 languages. We've
02:32had a Fortune 500 aerospace
02:34manufacturer reclaim 75% of
02:36its support budget to be able
02:38to bring in
02:40technologies and leverage. So I think that
02:42you're going to see both happier
02:44employees and better outcomes
02:46while also making
02:48the government more efficient.
02:50And this is for anyone
02:54on the panel. How would
02:56you address people's concerns about
02:58AI displacing jobs
03:00being something
03:02that will lead to
03:04layoffs or
03:06people not being able
03:08to work?
03:10I'm happy to start. I think it's
03:12going to happen. And it's not going to be
03:14the jobs we think. It's going to be like
03:16low level lawyers. And
03:18that's, that's going to be hard. I mean,
03:20because you think about a lot of these
03:21professions are apprentice
03:22professions. Where do the senior partners
03:24come from? If the low level lawyers,
03:26the low level doctors are being replaced
03:28by AI. Some society has to think
03:30about whether there'll be new jobs
03:32in all previous revolutions. There have
03:34been new jobs to replace old jobs. This
03:36is going to be different. That's why you see a lot of talk
03:38about AGI.
03:40Sorry, about universal basic income.
03:42UBI. Like, is this going to be
03:44different? Where we need to figure out
03:46how to give people
03:48the ability to survive.
03:50And we don't know. We don't know a lot of these
03:52things. So those are very real fears.
03:54And I think we as society should think about
03:56them before they happen. We're not good at that,
03:58but we should.
04:00Congressman, just briefly, I just point out that
04:02there's been a lot of government reports
04:04on this issue and a lot of efforts about
04:06government retraining and so on and so forth. It's very hard
04:08to have a crystal ball to predict the jobs and skills that
04:10are needed in the future. But I'll just point out that
04:12just ten years ago, everyone was predicting a whole
04:14bunch of jobs that would be dislocated. The most famous
04:16one at number one was going to be radiologists.
04:18And just a couple weeks ago, the New York Times
04:20ran a piece to basically say, there's more radiologists
04:22than ever and they're utilizing AI to
04:24improve their jobs and free up time to do better
04:26things. And that's the story of technological
04:28change in sector after sector,
04:30is that we sometimes don't understand how
04:32complex human machine interactions work
04:34and actually can change jobs for the better
04:36and improve the employment output over time.
04:40I agree with being a technology optimist.
04:42I will say, though, that the unemployment rate
04:44for people between the ages of 21 and 29
04:48these days with a college degree is 15 percent.
04:52And so the challenge, I think, as Mr. Schnauer pointed out,
04:58is how especially at the entry level for people,
05:02particularly with college degrees, how are we going
05:04to create these jobs and how are they going to be able to use the tools
05:08of AI to be effective. But I appreciate all of your thinking on this
05:14and appreciate your being here for your testimony.