AI workshops recently held in Georgia's new Horizons Innovation Lab have participants immersing themselves in the practical applications of artificial intelligence, as well as the ethical considerations that must be part of successful AI implementations.

In a session designed to help put generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot to meaningful use, the emphasis was on how to communicate effectively with the tools through prompts. Instructor Brent O'Guin of the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated how refining your prompts and sustaining a dialogue can open the tools' capabilities to help solve problems, streamline work and generate ideas.

A second workshop, "An Adventure in Ethics Making," saw participants wrangling with some of the ethical dilemmas that arise in AI use. They were coached on how to identify the correct ethical questions to ask and then how to begin to resolve the tensions. Dr. Rose Procter of North Georgia University and noted authority on ethics Dr. Catharyn Baird led this session.

AI Program leaders envision additional sessions of these workshops and others to prepare state team members to capitalize on artificial intelligence. Watch the AI Program website, ai.georgia.gov, for announcements.

Let’s face it, modernizing legacy government systems isn’t typically described as “exciting.” But the Criminal Justice E-Filing Project (CJEP) might just be the exception. This ambitious initiative is turning heads in the tech world by replacing a tangle of outdated systems with a sleek, serverless AWS-powered architecture. And the results? Nothing short of transformational.

The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), in partnership with its Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) program, set out to do more than just update old software. They aimed to reshape how prosecutors, public defenders, court clerks, and supervision officers communicate and share information—securely, quickly, and reliably.

For years, CJEP ran on webMethods, a platform that once got the job done but had grown brittle under pressure. As traffic increased and the need for complex integrations grew, the old system, built on custom Java, Flow services, and tightly coupled state machines, became a maintenance headache. Scaling it was hard. Debugging it was harder. Enter the modernization team from Georgia’s Digital Experience (GDX) program. Their solution? A complete re-architecture built on cloud-native, serverless design principles.

AWS Step Functions now serve as the brains of the operation, orchestrating workflows with built-in retry logic, error handling, and clear visibility into each transaction. Lightweight, purpose-built Python Lambda functions tackle everything from XML validation and GUID generation to header processing and MTOM handling. Even the problem of large file uploads (think massive PDFs) was addressed elegantly, with a custom Flask service on AWS Fargate sitting behind an Application Load Balancer, allowing secure, scalable file intake without breaking the serverless model.

In the new design, documents and

metadata are stored in AWS S3 and DynamoDB, respectively. Routing information and certificate data are now served from DynamoDB, eliminating the need for legacy SQL-based routing configurations. Dead Letter Queues (DLQs) and EventBridge rules provide granular error detection, redrive capabilities, and automated alerting, replacing the manual resubmission tools found in the previous BPM task UI.

What’s more, security and traceability are front and center. AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray provide full-stack observability, and strict IAM role-based access ensures everything remains CJIS-compliant and audit-ready.

And the payoff? It’s big.

• The project wrapped ahead of schedule and under budget.
• Core system migration was completed in just six months (20 sprints), with tailored interface solutions delivered in three more.
• Final integration testing took about two months, bringing the whole thing across the finish line with time to spare.
• Infrastructure maintenance was slashed by 80%.
• New interface onboarding can now happen in as little as 12 sprints.
• The entire codebase is portable, giving other Georgia agencies the ability to leverage it easily.
• Technical debt was dramatically reduced, and documentation was overhauled for clarity and completeness.

Perhaps most exciting of all, this isn’t just a one-off win. CJEP is now a blueprint for how state agencies can modernize critical systems using cloud technologies without compromising on compliance, security, or stability.

So, the next time someone tells you government IT can’t innovate, point them to Georgia and the CJEP team’s serverless success story.

Tackling cybersecurity challenges typically requires more than a single step, tool, policy, or precaution. It may take a program, and almost always it takes discipline. Securing the digital supply chain against cyber risk is no exception.

The GTA-hosted Technology Summit in June explored that challenge. State agencies and entities have to prepare to block cyber attackers who find ways to use software and tools from trusted vendors to gain unauthorized access to state systems.

Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank's Terry Brown, one of the summit's featured speakers, recommended a business-of-IT approach. That's when an organization integrates product and portfolio management,

IT finance, project management and business agility capabilities into a cohesive, strategic whole. Terry emphasized that cyber defenses are more likely to succeed when IT is managed as a business.

Cybersecurity expert Dr. Gerald Auger, another summit speaker, described real-world digital supply chain attacks to illustrate the devastating impact they can have. State government's high-value assets, he said, make it a prime target. He advocated adding security provisions to procurement elements (e.g., contracts, terms and conditions).

You can hear Dr. Auger's remarks and those of Terry Brown in a recording of the summit, available now.