{"id":42358,"date":"2021-08-12T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T13:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/?p=42358"},"modified":"2023-11-08T15:12:24","modified_gmt":"2023-11-08T20:12:24","slug":"googles-ai-helped-wisconsin-clear-unemployment-backlog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/googles-ai-helped-wisconsin-clear-unemployment-backlog\/","title":{"rendered":"Google’s AI helped Wisconsin clear unemployment backlog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many states, Wisconsin struggled to process torrents of unemployment insurance claims precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but officials said Thursday they finally cleared a mammoth backlog with the use of AI technology from Google Cloud.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amy Pechacek, who heads the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, told StateScoop she contracted the work just several weeks after Gov. Tony Evers nominated her last September. A former deputy secretary at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections with experience in crisis management in two Wisconsin county governments, Pechacek said she was immediately struck by the severity of the agency\u2019s operational shortcomings as she sized up a 770,000-claim backlog.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are using a 50-year-old mainframe COBOL<\/a> system,\u201d Pechacek said. \u201cIt is literally the black screen with the green blinky cursor where you have to press F5 to navigate. I couldn\u2019t even believe it. I fell off my chair.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

‘It’s insane’<\/h4>\n

To zero out the backlog, Pechacek said officials handed off historical data to Google so it could train a machine-learning model. The company used it to analyze the state\u2019s backlog and applied \u201cconfidence scores\u201d to each application, indicating how likely it was that a given application should be approved or forwarded to human agents for possible rejection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond operating an aged system powered by an outmoded programming language, Pechacek said, the agency\u2019s operations were also slowed by an absence of any secure form of digital communication with the public. If the workforce agency needed additional documents for a claim, the applicant had two options: regular mail or fax. And as the state paid out billions in benefits, she said, mail poured into \u201ca huge mailroom\u201d for processing, with hundreds of state workers manually entering information into computers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou could just see how inefficient this was,\u201d Pechacek said. \u201cThis just adds delays, delays, delays. And I don\u2019t know about you, but I haven\u2019t seen a fax machine in 20 years. It\u2019s insane.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She added that those with questions about their applications can call and talk to someone, but the hours are limited \u2014 the call center has to shut down before the mainframe begins batch processing claims at 6 p.m. each day.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Google helped the state with that, too, developing an online portal allowing the agency to accept photos and documents \u2014 basic functionality in 2021 that Pechacek admitted seems ridiculous to celebrate, but that constitutes \u201ca victory\u201d nonetheless.<\/span><\/p>\n

No more ‘jargon and legalese’<\/h4>\n

The upgrades also included a rewrite of the state\u2019s application, formerly a confusing 100-question document that Pechacek said she herself completed to see what it was like and failed to answer some of the questions correctly.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was full of jargon and legalese and acronyms that were undefined,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were counterintuitive, illogical and it was understandable why people were answering the way they were because they were just written very poorly, so we just went through and rewrote the whole thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Google analyzed which questions were tripping people up most frequently so when officials rewrote the questions \u2014 in clear, plain language, Pechacek said \u2014 they knew where to focus their efforts.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pechacek said she hired Google after seeing it perform similar for work for Arizona, and said the speed \u2014 just a few weeks \u2014 with which they deployed solutions for Wisconsin was \u201cfantastic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Processing claims quickly has been a balancing act for states as they\u2019ve sought to serve legitimate applicants as quickly as possible while also screening out <\/span>fraud<\/span><\/a>, which spiked during the pandemic<\/a>. And Google helped Wisconsin screen for fraud, too, Pechacek said, in several ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Applicants are required to authenticate their identities through LexisNexis, which puts the user through questions about their credit history. And Google\u2019s technology screens application data \u2014 including IP addresses from abroad or whether the same bank account is used on more than one application \u2014 so officials can investigate any claims that look fishy.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Google\u2019s work relieved Wisconsin of its heavy claims backlog, the legacy mainframe system with its \u201cblinky cursor\u201d remains. Evers signed legislation in January authorizing the workforce department to find a vendor for a modern replacement, and Pechacek said applications for that procurement closed last week. Officials have estimated that project<\/a> could cost as much as $100 million, but Pechacek said the bright side is that the department is planning for an iterative migration to a cloud-based system that\u2019s followed by yearly reviews of the platform.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis is going to be part of our manual review so that Wisconsin never finds itself again with 50-year-old technology because modernization is just something that we are just in a constant state of moving forward,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officials said the company’s machine learning tech helped clear 770,000 applications and screen for fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":42361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[24394,20649,4677],"tags":[184,278,4788,5272,7268,20033,20034],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4696],"class_list":["post-42358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-emerging-tech","category-state","tag-machine-learning","tag-wisconsin","tag-it-modernization","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-unemployment","tag-amy-pechacek","tag-artificial-intelligence","author-colin-wood"],"yoast_head":"\nGoogle's 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