AI Can Identify, Classify and Secure Data for States - GovTech

The Center for Digital Government’s* 2026 Digital States Survey, released last week, revealed that the past two years have brought considerable maturity to states’ efforts to both govern and take advantage of the fast-moving technology. Beyond introducing AI-powered productivity tools across their workforces, states are starting to identify — and deploy — tools to help with cybersecurity, procurement and application development.

But from the early days of AI in the public sector, leaders acknowledged the link between effective data management and being able to take full advantage of the technology’s potential. As its capabilities have continued to grow, states are now seeing AI itself as a tool to help get data in shape. In the Digital States Survey, more than half of states reported evaluating AI for data management.

“One of the challenges we have in state government is the amount of data we have at our disposal that we manage,” said Delaware CIO Bob Osmond, noting that much of that is sensitive and highly regulated in specific ways. “AI can be very helpful on classification of that data.”

Osmond is among a small group of state IT leaders who have held the CIO title in multiple states. Named in Delaware earlier this year, Osmond previously served as Virginia’s CIO for four years.

Video transcript: Fundamentally, you need to understand what types of data you have and its level of sensitivity so that you apply the right framework in place to manage it, to make sure that it's being secured correctly. And so AI allows us to work at scale and classify petabytes of data. And I think that's very important because we need to understand what we're working with. I think there's other tools around AI around helping us manage retention schedules, maintaining things such as, are the right protocols, the access points of the data, are the right people accessing the data.

We look carefully at insider threats, not necessarily through malicious behavior, but through maybe mistakes or where people click on the wrong file and they meant to send it one place and they send it to the wrong place. Those are also data breaches. And so we need to protect sometimes our staff from themselves, from mistakes, and AI can help us with that.

*The Center for Digital Government is part of e.Republic, Government Technology's parent company.