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Government agencies dealing with a surge in unstructured data are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence and process enhancements to better manage the growing volume of digital records.
In a Federal News Network panel organized by Casepoint, representatives from various agencies — from the Army to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — talked about their initiatives to modernize digital recordkeeping.
“Across government, we’re seeing information expand at a pace that people and traditional records management and disclosure methods simply cannot match,” said Timothy Kootz, deputy assistant secretary for shared knowledge services at the State Department’s Bureau of Administration. “On top of that, the public now expects data to be easy to find, searchable, and readily available.”
Kootz highlighted the State Department’s successful pilot program using AI to declassify cables.
“We’re already using AI tools that perform declassification reviews more quickly and consistently than a human team — and more importantly, these tools allow us to scale,” Kootz explained. “We anticipate our declassification workload, specifically for cables, to increase five times over in the coming years, and without AI, we simply could not keep pace. With these tools, we can handle the rising demand without needing to expand our workforce proportionally.”
Embedded experts
Carrie McVicker, executive director for the Enterprise Services Agency at the Army, stated her office faces comparable challenges and opportunities, including those related to declassification and automation.
“One step we’ve taken is placing a records management specialist directly within our declassification facility, because we discovered during modernization efforts that we sometimes create our own obstacles when it comes to retrieving and reviewing records for declassification,” McVicker said.
“Having someone embedded there and strengthening the connection between records management and declassification has been essential to our modernization efforts, particularly regarding the architecture for declassification and how data flows in and out of our declassification facility,” she added.
Surfacing critical knowledge
While the FDIC does not face declassification backlogs, the agency is still experiencing a “huge surge” of unstructured data, according to Richard Huffine, assistant director of enterprise information and records management. This includes emails, chat messages, video, and other media managed under federal record retention rules.
“We’ve put in place a capstone program that helps us identify, based on a person’s role, what records they may hold upon separation. But we’re also exploring how to surface the most essential knowledge — so people work with a single trusted version of a document rather than juggling 18 different versions,” Huffine said. “We want to distinguish between files that must be preserved long-term due to their historical and decision-making value and those that can be rotated out or aren’t as critical.”
Data challenges across functions
The rapid expansion of data has wide-ranging implications for multiple agency responsibilities, including records management, Freedom of Information Act requests, investigations, and litigation, according to Kelly Swank, vice president of business development for government at Casepoint.
“With AI being adopted across government, data volumes are likely to grow at least five times beyond what they already are today,” Swank said. “We’re seeing organizations take a holistic view of the data lifecycle, since datasets across different functions are interconnected. Establishing repeatable, automated, and defensible workflows is critical when managing data across an agency. We’ve integrated AI into our tools to streamline processes and automate many tasks for agencies — significantly reducing the time needed for human review.”
AI agents
J.D. Smith, deputy director of the Executive Services Directorate at Washington Headquarters Services in the Defense Department, said his team aims to move away from manual processes in records management.
AI agents, he said, can “put our policies, file plans, and records disposition schedules into practice at scale.”
“We want to redirect human effort toward oversight and program administration, rather than spending time on tedious, labor-intensive tasks like traditional filing duties,” Smith explained.
Smith described two related issues his team is tackling. The first is improving management of existing records within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, while the second focuses on handling records “at the point of creation.”
This involves deploying “AI personas across the organization that are aligned with records disposition schedules, automating our current manual workflows,” Smith said. “These agents handle the work of identifying records, categorizing them, classifying them, filing them, applying preservation holds, processing information requests, conducting searches, supporting e-discovery, and adding missing metadata — all of which serves not only our operational needs but also strengthens data utilization to create a decision-making advantage for the secretary of war.”
At the same time, WHS is working on improving how records are managed from the start.
“How do we manage records at the moment they’re created, rather than retroactively?” Smith said. “We’re exploring AI-powered copilots modeled after a file clerk — an AI bot using AI-enhanced robotic process automation — that can analyze content as it’s being written. As you draft a file, a prompt might appear: ‘It looks like you’re drafting an international legal agreement. If so, here are the file numbers to choose from. Please click here, and we’ll file it correctly, add the appropriate metadata, and manage its lifecycle from the very beginning.'”
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