AI in Action | October 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us solve the greatest challenges of our time from health care, agriculture, and education to transportation, energy, and national security. However, recognizing and addressing the genuine risks associated with AI is crucial for its responsible advancement.
When guided by ethics, transparency, and fairness, responsible AI can spark creativity and help usher in a more prosperous and sustainable future.
See how AI is improving our lives, growing our economy, and keeping us safe.
AI in Action
The U.S. Treasury Department is leveraging AI to save taxpayers billions
This month, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced that its increased use of artificial intelligence in fraud detection helped prevent or recover more than $4 billion in fraud and improper payments over the past year, up from $652.7 million in FY23. Online payment fraud is expected to surpass $362 billion by 2028, and check fraud in the U.S. has surged by 385% since the pandemic, according to the Treasury Department. By leveraging the power of AI to analyze large quantities of data, Treasury can more effectively detect patterns of fraud commonly used by criminals, fight back against rising cases of fraud, and save taxpayers billions.
Learn more.
The U.S. Army is using AI to enhance hurricane relief operations
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, the U.S. Army deployed its AI-enhanced Maven Smart System to aid in relief efforts. The system, which is designed to facilitate battlespace awareness and targeting, is being used to map road closures, cellular outages, supply needs, and other data in real time to assist FEMA and U.S. Northern Command in their efforts to help people whose homes and communities were destroyed. With the help of AI, the system provides responders with the information needed to make quick, on-the-ground decisions, such as where to send medical supplies or how many truckloads of water to take into certain storm-ravaged areas.
Learn more.
Amazon’s Proteus uses AI to improve workplace safety and worker experience
Proteus, Amazon’s first fully autonomous mobile robot, leverages AI to navigate and move heavy carts of packages around warehouses so they can be loaded into trucks while safely moving around employees in open spaces. Amazon integrated AI into Proteus’s sensing and navigation technology to detect humans and navigate outside of fenced-off areas where other Amazon robotics work. Using AI to determine which obstacles are human allows Proteus to give people more space and know when to make appropriate warning noises. Without these AI capabilities, Proteus would both disrupt customers’ orders and overwhelm workers through unnecessary alerts and inefficient movement. Proteus’s ability to work directly with people will help Amazon safely scale faster delivery of a larger selection of items to a greater number of customers. Amazon’s Proteus is an example of how public policy that supports the integration of AI in the workplace can improve safety, better worker experience, and deliver benefits to consumers.
Learn more.
AI speeds cities’ lead pipe search with EPA deadline weeks away
AI is helping seismologists find the next monster earthquake
Stanford researchers use AI to simulate clinical reasoning
GE HealthCare announces time-saving AI tool for doctors who treat cancer
AI Spotlight
This month, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs Sir Demis Hassabis, and Google DeepMind Director Dr. John Jumper were co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Before AlphaFold, predicting the structure of a protein was a complex and time-consuming process. AlphaFold’s predictions, made freely available through the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, have given more than two million scientists and researchers from 190 countries a powerful tool for making new discoveries. The AlphaFold 2 paper, published in 2021, remains one of the most-cited publications of all time.
AI has long shown tremendous promise for use in scientific research, and AlphaFold was proof-of-concept. As more scientists adopt AI for use in everything from building data to simulating experiments, drug design, modeling complexity, discovering novel solutions for extant problems, and building upon existing knowledge, we will continue to see foundational scientific breakthroughs in the years ahead.
About AI for America
AI for America is an initiative to educate the public about how AI is being used to improve lives, grow our economy, and keep us safe. The initiative combines coalition building, advocacy, social media, and traditional media to demonstrate the immense economic and societal benefits of AI. AI for America is funded by TechNet, the national, bipartisan network of innovation economy CEOs and senior executives. TechNet advances public policies at the federal and state level that make the United States the world leader in innovation. Its diverse membership includes dynamic American businesses ranging from startups to the most iconic companies on the planet. For more information, go to technet.org and AI4America.com.