Pennsylvania’s groundbreaking pilot program testing generative AI in state government has concluded with resounding success, revealing major productivity boosts and widespread employee approval. Governor Josh Shapiro unveiled the results todayc alongside leaders from OpenAI, Carnegie Mellon University, and organized labor, positioning the Commonwealth as a national leader in ethical, effective AI integration.
Over the course of the yearlong pilot, 175 state employees from 14 agencies used ChatGPT Enterprise to support tasks like writing, summarizing, research, coding, and IT support. According to the final report, employees reported saving an average of 95 minutes per day, citing significant improvements in efficiency, clarity, and output quality. More than 85% of participants described their experience with ChatGPT as “somewhat positive” or “very positive,” with nearly half having never used the tool before.
The program, launched in January 2024, followed Gov. Shapiro’s Executive Order 2023-19, which outlined clear principles for AI use in state government, including fairness, transparency, safety, and employee empowerment. Participants received prompt engineering support, live training, and access to workshops through a partnership with Carnegie Mellon’s Block Center for Technology and Society.
The findings emphasized that AI is not a replacement for human judgment. In fact, the most effective outcomes came when employees combined their domain expertise with AI’s speed and summarization capabilities. ChatGPT was especially effective in helping staff navigate complex policies, condense lengthy documents, brainstorm communications, and debug code.
Use cases highlighted in the report included drafting accessibility roadmaps, refining policy documents based on NIST standards, improving job classification systems, and simplifying technical communications for broader audiences. Participants who used the tool strategically reported the greatest benefits.
Yet adoption was not uniform. Some participants cited barriers including inaccuracy concerns, unfamiliarity, and lack of time to explore the tool’s full capabilities. The report also noted that while most users saw ChatGPT as a helpful partner, it struggled in areas such as image generation, legal citations, and PDF extraction. These insights will help inform future tool selection and training efforts.
To build on the pilot’s success, Pennsylvania will expand training opportunities, test new AI use cases, and maintain human oversight as a central tenet of AI integration. The Commonwealth also launched the Generative AI Labor and Management Collaboration Group, ensuring public employees help shape the future of AI in government.
As the first U.S. state to launch such a pilot, Pennsylvania now aims to share its playbook with other states. The Shapiro Administration’s AI strategy reinforces a key message: government innovation can be both bold and responsible — with people at the center.
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