The Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General is looking to data analytics and artificial intelligence tools to respond more quickly to the flood of calls it gets from its whistleblower hotline every year, and to stay ahead of fraud before getting a call about it.
David Yacobucci, the assistant IG for analytics, acknowledges limits to what these AI tools can do, and says they won’t replace the work of auditors and investigators. They can’t show human operators how they’ve arrived at an answer, but when auditors are looking for a needle in a haystack, Yacobucci says these tools can “help narrow the haystacks.”
