State and Local Governments Can Leverage LLMs for Better Document Management

scaling LLMs is not just about the technology," he notes. "It's also about empowering government employees."

Matthew Dietz Senior Global Government Strategist, Cisco

While LLMs offer much promise, they also come with risk, particularly around data privacy and potential bias. Data fed to LLMs needs to be kept secure, and the people using the models must be sure that their LLMs do not inadvertently incorporate or propagate any bias.

State and local entities can mitigate those risks "by ensuring strong data governance, by keeping sensitive information protected through local, private and secure LLM deployments, and by conducting regular audits to prevent biases and data corruption," Dietz says.

DIVE DEEPER: Data governance strategies can help avoid AI biases.

Another risk comes with "over-reliance on this new technology, or assuming it's a quick fix," Gaudet says.

"While LLMs and generative AI offer tremendous value and potential, they still require human oversight, often referred to as human-in-the-loop. I prefer to emphasize the need for the right human in the loop," he says.

"Ensuring that a skilled and relevant staff member reviews the data for errors and bias reduces over-reliance and maintains accountability at the appropriate level," he says. "Ultimately, whether we create content independently, with a team or by using tools like LLMs, we remain responsible for the final results."

To demonstrate the art of the possible in state and local government, Majerus points to a recent real-world example: The Nebraska Judicial Branch is leveraging LLMs on Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that helps users build generative AI applications.

"Handling about 285,000 legal cases annually, the Nebraska Judicial Branch manages hundreds of thousands of paper documents, audio and video files, and various forms of evidence every year," Majerus says. AWS helped the branch automate its document management system and introduce a generative AI feature that helps attorneys access data quickly from any case exhibit.

LEARN MORE: Intelligent document processing may be AI's most palatable use case.

In addition, "contact centers and citizen experience applications are other spaces where LLMs can improve the conversational AI experience" for state and local agencies, she says. "LLMs can understand intent and sentiment, and can even provide sophisticated reasoning to engage in humanlike conversations and offer complex answers."