Witness urges House to reform IT procurement and adopt rapid AI pilots with CAO support

Aubrey Wilson, director of global initiatives at PopVox, told a House Committee on House Administration subcommittee that Congress should partner with the Chief Administrative Officer to overhaul House IT procurement and create faster pathways to pilot artificial intelligence tools for constituent services.

"Chatbots represent one of the lowest-hanging fruit," Wilson said, arguing they are "familiar to users, quickly deployable, and capable of providing 24/7 assistance regardless of users' age, language, or education level." Wilson framed the recommendation as a way to improve how constituents access information and services.

Wilson presented international examples to show feasibility. She described Estonia's deployment of two AI legislative assistants for members and staff that search parliamentary databases for laws, proposals and amendments, and Estonia's public-facing chat interface that routes citizens to 18 agencies for tasks such as renewing ID cards, filing complaints and borrowing library books. She also cited Brazil's Elicis suite, which aggregates and analyzes public input, and a 2024 Remesh-facilitated dialogue that Wilson said aggregated community input used by international negotiators.

Those examples, Wilson said, illustrate that legislatures can modernize without sacrificing accountability. "The House has all the inspirational components it needs, but it must go beyond one-off initiatives by adopting a new way of doing things that allows ongoing experimentation, learning, and refinement," Wilson told the subcommittee.

Wilson urged concrete institutional reforms: partner with the CAO to reform procurement and increase transparency; explore new contracting vehicles; establish rapid pilot authorities for low-risk or no-code experiments; and support innovation sandboxes such as House Digital Services' data lake to test tools before institution-wide deployment. She recommended prioritizing "robust but expedient cybersecurity review processes" and warned that "a one-year authorization timeline for new tools is incompatible with two-year election cycles," arguing authorization and pilot timelines need to align with the speed of technology and legislative terms.

The testimony cited existing House resources — the congressional hackathon, House Digital Service, the modernization initiatives account and the congressional data task force — as foundations that could be leveraged into institutional pathways for approving and scaling tools.

Wilson closed by telling the subcommittee she looked forward to their questions. The subcommittee proceeded to the Q&A portion of the hearing (questions and answers not included in this testimony).