State employees increasingly rely on AI in their personal work, but using public versions of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude on state devices creates serious data privacy and security risks. Without a secure, governed alternative, agencies face a tradeoff between productivity gains and protecting state and resident data.
| Year added | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Status as of Spring 2026 | Deployed |
| Primary Agency | Central IT / CIO Office |
| Approach and Solution | Massachusetts announced an enterprise AI assistant powered by ChatGPT — through a partnership with OpenAI selected via competitive procurement — making it the first state to deploy the tool enterprise-wide. The assistant will eventually be available to nearly 40,000 executive-branch employees through a phased rollout beginning with the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) and expanding to other agencies in the coming months, operating in a secure environment where inputs are not used to train public AI models. Employee use is optional and supported by EOTSS Privacy Office terms and conditions, agency-level points of contact, training programs, and an AI Assistant Knowledge Center; the tool is intended for tasks like drafting first versions of documents, research, content translation, and summarizing spreadsheets, and is explicitly not used to make eligibility decisions or to communicate with residents on behalf of the state. |
| Tags | |
| Who it Serves | Government staff |
| Area of Impact | Operations & Productivity |
| AI Technology Type | Generative AI |
| Level of Human Oversight | AI-assisted decision (human review required) |
Alaska's Office of Information Technology (OIT) added AI enhanced Teams transcription and Microsoft 365 Copilot to the state's secure enterprise license, giving employees a vetted tool to draft, summarize, and prototype AI-enabled workflows inside the state's existing data perimeter.
The California Department of Technology (CDT) publishes an annual report inventorying high-risk automated decision systems used by state agencies. The 2025 initial filing reported no in-scope systems, a finding that drew public criticism.
The Indiana Office of Technology ran an eight-week Microsoft Copilot pilot across multiple agencies in fall 2025, then used the following months to address risks and gaps before rolling out Copilot Chat to all state staff. Any employee can request access after completing required training, and agencies can purchase the full M365 Copilot license on top of that. Training extends to the governor's cabinet secretaries, who attend sessions to learn the tool's capabilities, limits, and appropriate use.
With $64,000 from the Technology Modernization Fund and additional Microsoft investment, Minnesota IT Services stood up the nebulaONE chatbot development platform as a shared pilot environment for executive-branch agencies. The platform is designed for use with Low and Moderate classification data and supports agency teams in prototyping chatbots and retrieval-augmented generation tools against public data sources. The initial scope covered installation, configuration, and staff training, with pilots intended to inform operational and technical practices for scaling generative AI across state government.