Elastic VP Chris Townsend on standardizing data for scalable government AI

Chris Townsend, VP of Sales at Elastic, discussed the challenges and advancements in implementing AI in government services since 2024. He highlighted the shift from skepticism to full adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) for improving government efficiency and citizen experience. The main challenge now is securely and reliably accessing data from various environments for AI applications. Townsend emphasized the need for data standardization and operationalization at scale. He also stressed the importance of secure data governance, including role-based access control, attribute-based access control, and field-level security to protect sensitive data. Elastic’s role is to provide solutions for these challenges.