VA staffers are piloting two chatbots for internal use

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of the Chief Technology Officer is piloting two internal generative artificial intelligence chat interfaces, according to an agency official. 

Kaeli Yuen, the data and AI product lead in the VA’s OCTO, said in an interview with FedScoop that the two pilots use generative AI interfaces to assist with administrative tasks, such as summarizing documents, writing emails, drafting talking points and helping write performance reviews. 

The bigger of the AI tools is trained on the public internet, while the smaller tool allows staff to upload documents and then query the tool about the information.

“The reception has been extremely positive, especially for the basic chat interface,” Yuen said. “I think people are just super excited to have something that makes their daily life a little bit easier. … For the [smaller] tool, I think there’s a little bit more feedback about how they wish that it had a bit more features and we are working toward building some of those features.”

The VA made the tools in-house, but in collaboration with Microsoft, according to Yuen. The tools are included in the agency’s most recent AI use case inventory for 2024 but do not appear to be public yet on the VA’s website.

During a panel at the Scoop News Group-produced Google Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Yuen said that employee exposure to AI tools is “quite helpful” for helping individuals feel more comfortable using the technology.

During the panel, Yuen said exposure to the tech, such as the chat tools, has resulted in the upskilling of VA staff. 

“It’s not quite as featureful as we would like, but we went forward and let people play with it anyway,” Yuen said. “Through that exposure … VA employees were able to, number one, actually teach us a lot about potential use cases for the tool, but also they gained exposure and gained familiarity with the tools, [and] spread it by word of mouth.”