Greetings from Vermont! I am Emily Smith, Director of Program Evaluation for the Division of Family and Child Health in the Department of Health. My journey from research and academia to evaluation in the public sector has contributed to my current perspective on ethical and creative integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into my everyday workflows. Here’s a starting point for exploring how you can leverage a wide range of AI tools to increase your capacity on the job.
Are you drowning in administrative tasks when you should be focusing on the big picture? If you’re in the evaluation industry, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Thankfully, AI is here to alleviate the mundane and give us the freedom to dive into higher-level thinking.
Hot Tips
Ever feel like you’re stuck in a rut trying to come up with new ideas? ChatGPT can supercharge your creativity and streamline your workflow. Try entering a prompt such as “Can you provide ideas for interactive activities to engage stakeholders in the evaluation process?”
Data can be complex and often messy, but AI can be your best friend when it comes to organizing it. Tools like Evernote and Notion categorize and index information, making it easy to search and access. Need a summary of a long report? SummarizeBot can pull out the key points and insights, so you can get the gist without wading through pages of text.
Creating templates for reports, surveys, and other documents can be a real time-suck. Tools like Docugami and Template.net can generate standardized templates based on best practices in no time. Whether you need a survey template or a report format, AI tools can generate something comprehensive and consistent. This not only saves time but also ensures that your evaluations are uniform, making it easier to compare results.
Technical jargon can be a real barrier when trying to communicate with a general audience. AI tools can help translate that complex language into something everyone can understand. Grammarly and QuillBot can take complicated survey questions and rephrase them in plain language, making the questions easier to understand and leading to more accurate and reliable data.
Keeping your data accurate and reliable is crucial. AI can help by performing automated quality checks, spotting inconsistencies, errors, and outliers in your datasets. DataRobot and Talend can compare new data against established benchmarks and flag anything that looks off. This ensures high standards of data integrity and reduces the risk of drawing wrong conclusions. Plus, AI can monitor data collection in real-time, providing instant feedback and corrections.
While AI offers numerous benefits, it’s important to proceed with caution. AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on. Transparency and accountability should be considered when incorporating AI into your work in any capacity. Privacy and ethical considerations must also be addressed, particularly when using AI to assist in data related tasks.
Rad Resource
Checkout this list of AI tools and their uses to get started. Comprehensive List of AI Tools – Navigate the World of Artificial Intelligence (theainavigator.com)
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