The Department of Homeland Security’s top artificial intelligence official believes the DHS mission will push technology experts to join the department’s recently announced “AI cadre.”
DHS announced this month plans to hire 50 AI technologists by 2024. He will join a cadre that DHS is modeling after the U.S. Digital Service, a White House organization that provides technology experts and consulting services to federal agencies.
Eric Hyson, DHS’s chief information officer and chief AI officer, said the department will leverage the Office of Personnel Management’s direct-hire authorities to immediately build the cadre. OPM issued these direct-hire authorities in the wake of President Joe Biden’s AI Executive Order.
“We’re taking a very aggressive approach to recruiting, partnering with organizations across the country, and rethinking the recruiting process,” Hyson said Feb. 8 at the Homeland Security and Defense Forum in Washington. told the Federal News Network after a speech at an event organized by
“Our [Chief Human Capital Officer] OPM has been really great at taking advantage of the new direct hire authority and setting up a process that’s going to move quickly and let us make the right assessments to get these in-demand candidates through the process as quickly as possible. Hysen added.
Hyson said at the event that the AI Corps will consist of “pretty senior-level talent.” DHS job descriptions indicate that corps members will be paid at the GS-15 General Schedule annual salary, which ranges from $123,000 to $191,900. The jobs are also remote positions, requiring “some travel and onsite presence for project-based requirements.”
While AI experts can command far higher salaries in the private sector, Hyson said he believes the DHS mission will be a big draw.
“It’s an in-demand skill set,” Hyson said. “But when you think about the opportunity you have at DHS, where else would you go where you can’t work on cutting-edge technology, but you It can be applied to missions, such as countering the flow of fentanyl. The United States, like combating child sexual exploitation and abuse, like making it easier to become a US citizen?
These are such critical activities. And we believe that the mission’s appeal will be enormous in conjunction with the aggressive recruitment work we are undertaking.”
AI Corps members will initially join Hyson’s office at DHS headquarters, which will then “farm them out across the department as needed,” Hyson said. The new officials will work on discrete DHS missions, such as combating fentanyl networks, combating child sexual exploitation and abuse, and providing immigration services.
DHS says it’s already using machine learning for tasks like detecting fentanyl. Department officials expect the use of AI-related technologies to only increase across all DHS mission areas.
In October, DHS released a policy on the use of commercial generative AI that allows employees to use such tools, as long as they follow certain rules, including not putting any protected DHS data into those systems.
Hyson said DHS employees “at every level” are now using tools like ChatGPT. “It’s already starting to change how we think and understand what this technology can do,” Hyson said.
Hyson said he recently used a large language model to help analyze the Senate’s initial supplemental spending and border security bill released earlier this month.
“It was such a long bill that it took some massaging to get it into the model,” he said. “But the value that you see in interactions with things that we do every day at DHS, like thinking about legislation, is really tremendous. So I think we’re going to get more and more of our employees to do that. Understanding what price can pay and bring and how they can take advantage of it.
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