UEOC makes study of AI impact a priority of several committees

Brice Wallace 

AI has been quite the buzzword lately, and a state commission is looking into several elements of the revolutionary technology.

Among the top priorities for the Unified Economic Opportunity Commission is investigating AI’s impact on workforce, education and data privacy. Several working groups and subcommittees are working this summer studying topics that ultimately could result in legislation or inclusion in the governor’s budget.

Ann Millner, a state senator and chair of the Talent, Education and Industry Alignment Subcommittee, said during a recent{mprestriction ids="1,3"} commission meeting that generative AI has important economic ramifications for the state, saying that “we have to be the people who have some leading AI talent out there at the top of our game.”

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce content in the form of high-quality text, imagery and audio in just a few seconds.

“This is going to be, I believe, the next significant shift in our economic opportunity in this state,” Millner told the commission. “That, combined with life science. And then you put the two together and think about generative AI, that helps us solve some of the most challenging healthcare problems out there.”

Millner said she recently spoke to an company executive who told her that AI is so important, he had some of his employees take a week “just playing” with generative AI and looking at the potential applications for increasing the company’s production.

Another company, involved in defense and aerospace, calls it “automation” rather than AI, she said. That company had proven the potential for the company to shrink the time it takes to get a product from the pre-design stage to manufacturing from months to weeks and was looking to shorten it to days.

“So, this has implications for our current workforce — everyone who’s out there,” Millner said. “And how do we bring people up to speed to know how to use this and use it appropriately and with integrity and ethics?”

Millner also said that colleges and universities throughout Utah need to incorporate AI training to improve their students’ skillsets.

“If you think about it, we need to be doing this in public education,” she said. “Our students, they are using it. That’s what I’m told. They’re using it. The question is, did they learn to use it in ways that are going to help them think about potential careers and jobs?”

The UEOC’s Working Group on Technology, Innovation and Investment also is considering AI issues this summer. Chris Wilson, a state senator and working group co-chair, said it is “a very big, complicated area” and the working group is looking into data privacy, talent development, workforce disruption, incorporating AI into college degree programs and “supporting positive use of AI and protecting our consumers and our constituents from harmful potentials of AI.”

AI definitely has both negative and positive uses, he said, and there may be ways to help startups use AI in a test phase as a way of empowering innovation, he said.

In setting the stage for the commission’s summer work, Gov. Spencer Cox, the commission’s chair, stressed to the group that “this is about the big stuff.”

“This is about the substantive stuff,” he said. “This is not about nibbling around the edges. This is about us taking the biggest problems that are facing the state, working together, collaborating in ways that really we only do in Utah and coming up with solutions with big ideas and moving them forward.”{/mprestriction}