Treasurer reports positive results for OpenAI pilot program

North Carolina State Treasurer Brad Briner released the results of a 12-week pilot program between his office and OpenAI on Friday.

He first announced the agreement in March.

“As a reminder, we embarked on this partnership with a bright red-line attack, and that was to use within the parts of our department, and we did not touch personal and private data,” he said at a press conference. “We had three specific areas where we thought this would help the major goal of freeing up our team’s time to do higher-value work. The first was to accelerate the analysis of financial statements and improve our accuracy; the second was to summarize regulations and automate routine communications; and the third was to spot inconsistencies in data sets.”

Unclaimed Property and State and Local Government were the two divisions within the department that used OpenAI.

Briner said the program had very good results. 

“What we’ve learned first and perhaps most unsurprisingly is that this technology saves a material amount of time,” he said. “We estimate, thanks to our friends at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), which conducted the evaluation, [is] that it improved the productivity of our employees by about 10% in the early phases of the trial. That last piece is important because the second thing we learned is that it kept improving and it would have kept improving had the trial not ended. So we did not get to maximum productivity in the 12 weeks which we did this. And then third, we were able to orient our people towards more complex and human-centered interactions, which are inherently more productive and satisfying.”

Briner added that artificial intelligence is an incredibly powerful tool that is increasingly being used by many, and that state government needs to lean into it, respecting the “bright red line for privacy.”

“This technology is all about empowering public servants to do an even better job serving our citizens, not about replacing them,” he said. “We look forward to continuing to find ways to implement AI and other technologies in our work here to ensure that we serve the people of North Carolina even better every day.”

Dr. Siobahn Day Grady, the founding director of the university’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research (IAIER), said the 48-page report shows that the employees using ChatGPT expressed relief, enthusiasm, and delight. Overall, 71% had a very positive sentiment when using ChatGPT, while 7% had a neutral sentiment.

Employees began saving 15 to 30 minutes in the beginning of the initial survey, with the time going up to about 30 to 60 minutes a day with the final survey.

There were four user types. The biggests were sporadic users, who used it occasionally. The next largest percentage was super users, who were able to integrate ChatGPT from multiple different workflows. Third were consistent users who used it for repeatable tasks. And last were non-users.

A reporter asked if OpenAI could help out with automation functions at the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Briner joked that he wasn’t sure if he could “touch” DMV questions, but later he said there’s no question that the power of the technology for anything that deals with data could see tremendous productivity growth and could improve their operations like anyone else’s.

While OpenAI isn’t perfect and does make mistakes called “hallucinations,” Day Grady said everyone has to do their due diligence when using the technology and make sure that things are factual and not rely 100% on it to do their jobs.

Briner said that with the trial ending on Monday, they have been having a lot of conversations about the next steps but are unsure as they don’t know what the price will be for the continuation of the program.

“There’s real value to the tool,” he said. “It is, of course, not the only tool in artificial intelligence, and so we’re going to run some other trials and think about other solutions as well, but obviously extremely impressed with what we saw with OpenAI specifically. And you’ll hear from us again sometime in the coming months.”

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