Modern Tech for Modern Missions: AI in Transportation
Written by Kathleen Featheringham
Abstract
As transportation evolves, federal agencies need to integrate new technologies, maintain operations, and enable systems growth. But how do you speed innovation while staying mission focused? Kathleen Featheringham, director of AI strategy, explains how ethical artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming agencies and the future of transportation.
Accelerate your agency’s artificial intelligence journey
Artificial intelligence (AI) can help your agency realize predictability and efficiency benefits critical for moving people and goods, from predicting maintenance for complex, aging infrastructure to preventing transportation loss-of-control events. Capturing these benefits starts with knowing what AI can and can’t do, committing to the ethical use of AI, and keeping best practices for AI adoption in mind.
AI’s impact on transportation is clear. When the first glider took flight, when the first steam engine rolled down the rails, and even when the first wheel turned, all were true innovations for their time. But could their creators have ever imagined cars that drive themselves, subway trains that automatically adjust to their environment, or aircraft that operate with an algorithm co-pilot?
What Machines Do Best
While AI is not new, it’s now folding into the mainstream where it will increasingly shape the global economy and workforce. What are AI and machine learning best suited for now? For detecting patterns, learning to make predictions and recommendations, and processing data directly while learning without a need to have every rule specifically defined. Thinking about that from an outcome perspective, AI is useful for helping with operational efficiency, consistency, safety, and the identification of potential unknowns.
“What are AI and machine learning best suited for now? For detecting patterns, learning to make predictions and recommendations, and processing data directly while learning without a need to have every rule specifically defined.”
Using AI Ethically
Humans are essential to the ethical application of AI and should stay at the core of every AI system. As you begin your AI journey, it’s critical to clearly understand the parameters of the model design. And it’s also critical to know how those parameters evolve as learning happens. With this level of transparency, human experts in the federal workforce can powerfully shape and evaluate the solutions generated by AI.
Start Your AI Journey
Many organizations have already felt the pitfalls of early AI adoption—such as finding that they lack the technological and scientific expertise to operationalize this technology across the enterprise. This is how partnering with Booz Allen can help. We’ve collaborated with organizations at varying stages of their AI journeys. Through our lessons learned, here are a few keys to success as you begin the journey of embracing AI in the mission-critical transportation sector:
Your vision for AI must include all parts of your organization, not just IT.
It’s important to have an open, meaningful conversation about the right applications for AI and the outcomes you hope to achieve, ensuring they’re ethical, auditable, sustainable, and reliable.
Don’t go it alone. It’s critical to include a diversity of stakeholders on your AI journey who bring different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds.
Booz Allen's holistic approach to embracing AI, coupled with our knowledge and expertise, can help your agency move AI from an isolated concept to a solution that meets mission needs.
