Executive Summary
Connecticut state agencies are under simultaneous pressure to modernize service delivery, comply with new
federal grant analytics requirements, and absorb the rapid pace of change in artificial intelligence—all while facing constrained budgets and an expensive vendor market for AI capabilities. In late 2025, the Connecticut
Department of Administrative Services Bureau of Information Technology Solutions (DAS-BITS) launched the
Connecticut AI Enablement and Engagement Lab (CT AI Lab) to build a repeatable, low-cost internal capability to prototype, evaluate, and de-risk AI across state agencies—and to give leaders an unbiased counterpart to every vendor pitch. The lab pairs that build capability with the state’s first sustained AI literacy program. In eight months, a two-person team has produced six working AI prototypes in beta across seven agencies, trained 600+ state employees, and shared its open-source toolkit with peer states.
AI Products in active beta include:
- An AI-augmented Invoice Processor for Department of Public Health (DPH)
- An AI-powered financial screener tool for the Office of the Healthcare Advocate (OHA) that helps
residents identify hospital financial assistance eligibility - An LLM-powered bank examination pre-screening tool for the Department of Banking (DOB)
- An agentic assistant for CT licensing for the Department of Consumer Protection
- An AI-assisted rental assistance tool for Department of Housing
- An interagency AI-powered legislative intelligence platform
Literacy offerings include:
- 12 Bi-weekly office hour presentations on current events and trends in AI, open to agency staff
and leadership from across the state, drawing ~250 cumulative attendees from ~1,000 invited
statewide - Ongoing AI literacy workshops and training sessions for 3+ agencies
- 5+ Small group AI best practices and training sessions for agency commissioners and other state
leaders - A day-long AI-in-government workshop at UConn School of Public Policy with the state CIO and
CDO - A demo presentation on some of our pilots and workflows for AI officers from all 50 states at
the Center
for Civic Futures’ AI roundtable
The lab’s tools are built on a shared technical substrate that aims to make each additional product
easier to build and deploy. Some of the tools used to build this stack have been shared with other
states on GitHub (github.com/ct-ai-lab/ct-ai-lab-tools). The goals are to reduce fear of these
technologies through interactive experiences and to turn the experiment in the state’s internal AI
capability into a repeatable model. A small, agile team, a shared technical substrate, and agency
partnership means bespoke AI applications are built in weeks, at a fraction of external assistance
costs. All the while we aim to equip CT’s state workforce and leadership with the knowledge necessary to leverage the newest AI capabilities as they emerge.
