BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ – One positive outcome of the coronavirus pandemic has been agencies’ increased ability to quickly adapt to new circumstances, thanks, in many cases, to their use of robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbots to deliver internal and external services.

In Missouri, the Office of Administration’s IT Services Division, the state’s consolidated IT organization, launched a chatbot to help handle vastly more inquiries about unemployment insurance.

“Like most everybody, our unemployment insurance exploded, and in order to help relieve calls from the call center, we implemented a chatbot,” Missouri’s CIO Jeffrey Wann said. “We did it in about a week and then [spent] about a week and a half to train it.”

“We’ve got it down now so that we can deploy a chatbot technically in about 24 hours,” he said. “We’ve set up four of them now, and other areas of government are lining up. They want to do the same thing.”

At the federal level, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched the CMS Employee Roll Call Bot that can flag when employees aren’t logging in or are having trouble accessing agency systems. It gives senior leaders a single, up-to-date visual source of information about the health of its internal IT systems, communications networks and personnel. Read On: