“The ability of machines to make predictions, recommendations, or decisions normally done by people.”
That’s the definition of artificial intelligence (AI) used in the “action plan” issued Wednesday by a state task force charged with examining the now-omnipresent technology that continues to reshape the surface of all things digital — and many things physical.
“AI is one of the most transformative technologies that we will all experience in our lifetime, and Rhode Island is being proactive,” Chris Parisi, president of Trailblaze Marketing and the task force’s vice chair, said during a media briefing Wednesday at Rhode Island College (RIC).
“We need all Rhode Islanders, all business leaders, every elected official, to really take this seriously,” Parisi said. “Again, this is the most important thing that we’re doing right now. Believe me, the most transformative technology is going to affect how we work, how we live, how we learn.”
The Governor’s AI Task Force was formed by an executive order in February 2024 and first met in July that year, beginning its mission of molding recommendations and policy suggestions for responsible and wise use of AI. Since the task force’s inception, generative AI has become properly unignorable, from the banality of viral videos featuring irate foods to the seriousness of spoofed evidence in court and concerns about the technology’s requisite data centers eating up natural resources.
In December 2024, the task force broke up into six “fact-finding teams” that looked at major areas of concern spanning government, education, health care, finance, small businesses, and manufacturing and defense. The task force wondered: How can Rhode Island stay competitive in this increasingly crowded field?
“We all know that AI will affect every corner of our state’s economy,” said Jim Langevin, the former congressman who chairs the task force and serves as distinguished chair for RIC’s Institute for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies, at Wednesday’s briefing. “The question for Rhode Island is not whether AI will change our economy, but whether we are prepared to take full advantage of the benefits while thoughtfully managing the risk.”
A map included in the report emphasizes the ubiquity of efforts to bring AI into the embrace of state oversight, showing Rhode Island is one of 38 states with AI task units.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made AI an indispensable concern of his administration. Among Trump’s efforts to cultivate the machines are a January 2025 executive order meant to smash “Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” as well as the president’s own AI action plan, published in July 2025. Even Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has locked horns with Trump over his December 2025 executive order that attempts to rebuff state-level regulation of AI.
Rhode Island’s AI task force also wants state government, industry and education to embrace the technologies more fully, but not unconditionally.
“We’re not looking to have the government in this area lay out strict regulations about AI,” said RIC Professor Tim Henry, who runs the school’s Bachelor of Science program in Artificial Intelligence and led the task force’s eight-member sub-unit of academic leaders from across the state. “What we’re looking to do is pull a cross-sector group together that is going to advise.”
The group would have representatives from academia, industry and government, Henry said.
“Our goal was not just adoption, but responsible adoption that puts Rhode Islanders first,” Langevin said.
The report frontloads workforce development as a reason to pursue a more coordinated approach for AI usage. As the nature of work and life continue to be subsumed by a technology Langevin likened to the internet, the task force identified four overarching themes that “transcend industry needs” and can translate into “focused action.” They include:
- Education and “upskilling” the workforce, including initiatives like incentivized AI training, apprenticeship programs and AI accreditation to broaden workers’ AI literacy
- Government leadership, such as piloting AI in government services — perhaps chatbots or virtual assistants to help with certain constituent services — and improving technical support for policy management, plus “visible integration of AI into physical government services” such as the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority’s bus service
- Developing frameworks for use, which would include a “centralized AI guidance body”
- “Collaboration and scale,” which seeks to form cross-industry and cross-region partnerships as well as establish AI for Rhode Island (AI-RI), a virtual and physical hub that would serve as a source for guidance and collaboration and hopefully reduce “red tape” in government applications of AI
The report concludes with a recommendation to “appoint owners for each of the thematic areas to drive opportunities outlined in this report” but does not identify who those owners would be.
The report’s conclusion reads, “Implementation and coordination and innovation of how Rhode Island’s AI journey occurs should be industry led, in close collaboration with academic, government, and community partners.”
“This should be looked at as a blueprint,” Langevin acknowledged. “It should not be looked at as a one-and-done.”
Stay tuned on AI-RI
Though the task force painted its plan in broad strokes, its members did have ideas for what color palette to use. Langevin said the state has begun two initiatives: a working group within the state Department of Administration, and an AI Center of Excellence based in its division of Enterprise Technology Strategy and Services.
Chief Digital Officer Brian Tardiff, head of the state’s enterprise IT office, said the state is looking to award a vendor Center for Excellence project by the end of spring.
But as to the larger question of where leaders will congregate, Tardiff pointed to the AI-RI hub mentioned in the report. Langevin described it as a place where businesses could “use and understand trusted AI tools” — and experiment with models and algorithms using their own data — as the state and its academic partners, like RIC’s cyber institute, lay the groundwork for shared capacity.
The theme of a shared framework goes as far as suggesting the “creation of secure and stable technology stacks for state-wide stakeholders in AI operations” and to “build or designate a secure, shared data and compute environment for approved AI projects.”
What tools specifically would be part of this suite? Henry said the task force landed on no particular preference for which AI models or programs might be endorsed and used, and whether those models would be proprietary or open-source ones. He suggested the task force would likely land on “a core set of tools,” with each industry then building on that base depending on its needs.
Henry offered a less agnostic answer about security: Whatever is ultimately recommended in that technology stack, security would be “one of the most critical factors of all of this.”
Some of the report’s recommendations can be acted on now without government intervention, Henry said.
“A lot of the opportunities in each of the industry sectors they can start and take advantage of right now,” Henry said. “They don’t need to wait for funding from the government. They don’t need to wait for direction, necessarily, from the state.”
Finance is among the sectors most prepared to adopt AI, Henry said. “They’ve been using [it] in different forms for a number of years” he said. But manufacturing has been slow to adopt the technology.
Still, Henry added, in the task force’s conversations with and surveys of Rhode Islanders, all industries appeared receptive.
“What has come out of finance, and they have been probably the most vocal about this, is the need for workers,” he said. “What’s holding them back right now is they don’t have an AI workforce: people who understand AI, who can implement it safely and securely.”
The task force’s creator, Gov. Dan McKee, arrived late to the briefing because, he said, he had “things going on in the hospitals.”
“That was a long call,” the governor said, then reiterated his commitment to helping the state lead on AI.
“It’s not a fad,” McKee said. “We need to make sure that we’re keeping the people working, building things that matter, and those things will pay off for dividends for decades to come.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
