Beyond the Reading List: AI, Policy, and Explainability in Government
In this episode of AI-in-Gov: Inside the Black Box, hosts Amarda Shehu and Richard Jacik sit down with Rich Heimann, South Carolina’s inaugural Director of AI and author of a forthcoming book inspired by Ilya Sutskever’s legendary reading list, to explore the realities of building and governing AI at state scale. Heimann traces his path from DARPA and computational social science to leading one of the nation’s emerging statewide AI programs, breaking down how agencies evaluate use cases, measure risk, and wrestle with explainability in an era of increasingly opaque models.
This episode is sponsored by Solution Street.