Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, told Federal News Network in an interview published Tuesday that she has been focusing on four key capacities GSA needs and those are information technology modernization, customer experience, change management and data and analytics.

“If I can help implement those, it’s going to help GSA expand to meet the needs our customers come to us with in a way that I couldn’t even begin to imagine today,” she said.

Murphy, a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, noted that she is working on four areas and one of those is robotic process automation.

“We learned that we couldn’t just think of it as RPA, but it’s really looking at as an eliminate, optimize and automate program,” she said. “We’ve been able to save 70,000 hours worth of GSA labor so far and we’ve got another 200,000 hours identified that we’re going to be addressing.”

The three other focus areas Murphy discussed during the interview are the federal marketplace, lease cost savings work and shared services. She also offered updates on the public building service and GSA’s efforts to recruit, retain and reskill its personnel.

Matthew Donovan, acting secretary of the U.S. Air Force, has launched a new initiative to advance reforms and leverage a connected network of weapons, analytic tools and sensors to counter potential adversaries.

“Our advantage in future battles depends on our ability to fuse vast amounts of data to accelerate our decision cycle to guarantee the success of any mission. Victory in combat will depend on us becoming a Digital Air Force,” Donovan said in a release published Tuesday.

The Digital Air Force initiative intends to deploy an information technology infrastructure responsive to modern combat requirements, leverage data as the framework of machine learning and artificial intelligence to facilitate the decision-making process and enhance warfighter support and implement Agile business practices to improve the efficiency of the management enterprise.

“Every segment of the Air Force will be impacted by these changes: we are driving to integrate warfighting, information operations, cyber, and business practices as a vehicle for dominating great-power competition,” the document noted. “The weight of this reform demands direction from the most senior levels, so the Under Secretary of the Air Force will oversee and manage this critical path forward.”

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking for public input on a draft plan to promote government and industry engagement in artificial intelligence initiatives for economic and national security applications. 

The Commerce Department component said in a statement that the “U.S. Leadership in AI: Plan for Federal Engagement in Developing Technical Standards and Related Tools” strategy will focus on developing AI-related standards, promoting coordination among federal leaders, driving AI “trustworthiness” research, expanding public-private partnerships and driving international collaborations.

“The federal government has an important role to play, in partnership with industry and academia, to ensure that the U.S. maintains its leadership in AI. We want to make the most of this technology, while ensuring safety, privacy and security,” said Walter Copan, NIST director and undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology.

The draft plan was created to support the American AI Initiative and comply with a February 2019 Executive Order on push U.S. leadership in AI. Interested parties may submit feedback through July 19.