The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is using a health care bot to help the agency screen for coronavirus infections. The bot, developed by Microsoft and provided to the CDC for free, can assess symptoms and risk factors for people who fear they may have the new coronavirus, known as COVID-19. A Microsoft spokesperson said March 20 that the bot will initially be available on the CDC's website for people in select areas but will expand over time. The bot is meant to reduce the strain on the health care providers by reducing the amount of patients who come to facilities thinking they may have the virus. It uses artificial intelligence to allow the "CDC and other frontline organizations respond to these inquiries, freeing up doctors, nurses, administrators and other healthcare professionals to provide critical care to those who need it," according to Microsoft.

The Centers for Disease Control is using a health care bot to help the agency screen for coronavirus infections. The bot, developed by Microsoft and provided to the CDC for free, can assess symptoms and risk factors for people who fear they may have COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by coronavirus. A Microsoft spokesperson said March 20 that the bot will be initially be available on the CDC website for people in select areas but will expand over time. The bot is meant to reduce the strain on the health care providers by reducing the amount of patients who come to facilities thinking they may have the virus. It uses artificial intelligence to allow the "CDC and other frontline organizations respond to these inquiries, freeing up doctors, nurses, administrators and other healthcare professionals to provide critical care to those who need it."

The General Services Administration expects that its new partnership with the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center will ultimately lead to significant benefits for civilian agencies. The GSA is working with JAIC, which was established last year to speed up AI adoption across the Pentagon, to accelerate the center's process by adding AI into acquisition work, which GSA officials said they hope to turn around and offer civilian government. "We're able to utilize a lot of that educational material [and] best practices that they're getting and scale it up, standardize it in a sense so it can be spread among civilian agencies," said Omid Ghaffari-Tabrizi, acquisition lead at the GSA Centers of Excellence, speaking Dec. 5 at the GovernmentCIO AI and RPA in Government conference. "All of the AI that we're procuring for them, we're also hoping to procure for ourselves," Ghaffari-Tabrizi added. One frustration with the acquisition process is the time it takes from the start of the project to the end.