At a glance
CDC was the first federal agency to make a secure generative AI chatbot available to all staff, allowing staff across the agency to use AI for brainstorming, writing, coding, analyzing data, summarizing documents, and more. Strategic planning and decision making are improved when CDC staff can pair their expertise and judgment with AI tools and workflows.
By the Numbers: The Impact of the CDC Chatbot
- High Engagement: Over 10,000 staff have conducted more than 3 million chats and counting
- Strong Return on InvestmentA: For every $1 invested, CDC has realized an estimated $6.27 in benefit, a 527% return on investment.
- Time Saved: An estimated 41,460 CDC staff hours redirected to higher-value work, such as strategic planning and decision making.
- Cost SavingsA: Over $3.7 million estimated in labor costs saved to date.
- Pioneering Innovation: CDC was the first federal agency to launch an enterprise-wide Generative AI chatbot.
- Government-Wide Leadership: Shared best practices on chatbot development and Generative AI adoption with 36 federal departments and agencies, including all Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Operating Divisions, Department of War, Department of Education, and Department of State.
Key Capabilities of the CDC Chatbot
- Delivers Time Savings on Daily Tasks: Provides a secure interface that supports staff with everyday work tasks, such as text analysis, idea generation and brainstorming, writing and editing, coding assistance, data analysis, and summarization. Staff then have more time to focus on core responsibilities, including higher-level thinking, planning, and analysis.
- Offers Access to New AI Models: Provides CDC staff access to frontier GenAI models. CDC staff can experiment with new models and develop GenAI applications.
- Create Program-Specific Chatbots: CDC centers and programs can connect their enterprise data to the chatbot and create customized chatbot assistants, to provide responses based on program-specific requirements.
- Upload and Analyze Documents: Staff can upload relevant documents in a variety of file formats for real-time summary and analysis. Staff can easily ask questions based on document content without any technical setup.
AI in Action: Can AI Help CDC Teams Save Time and Improve Results? Yes!
When a CDC program team faced the challenge of analyzing 4,500 quarterly reports from recipients of a national grant program, they turned to AI. The team leveraged the CDC Chatbot to mine thousands of pages of unstructured text and data— dramatically accelerating the interpretation of results.
The impact? Faster, more comprehensive analysis, with an estimated savings of 5,500 labor hoursA and $500,000A in labor costs
- Estimated calculations for return on investment, time saved, and cost savings are based on an internal, unpublished CDC analysis of chatbot usage to include: tokens, task types, industry benchmarks on time savings, estimated labor rates, implementation costs, infrastructure costs, platform costs, and training and adoption costs. Please contact AI@CDC.Gov for additional inquiries.