AI for tribes: Managing risk and maximizing impact

Tribal leaders are being asked to do more than ever, often with limited staff, tight budgets and growing demands from their communities. As needs increase, many tribes are exploring new ways to modernize operations without compromising sovereignty or trust.

AI for tribes is a powerful opportunity to help close these gaps. From improving internal processes to expanding access to citizen services, AI has the potential to empower tribes to accomplish more with fewer resources. But questions around risk, data protection and cultural respect are top of mind.

Here’s an overview of how tribes can adopt AI securely, with practical impact:  

How can tribes benefit from AI?

Here are some areas where tribes are currently using AI to support operations and members: 

Grant writing automation

Generative AI can be used as a writing assistant, cutting down the manual effort by grant writers.

With AI, you can automatically generate content for grants or streamline proofreading and editing efforts. With the right tools, grant writers can expedite processes without downgrading quality by focusing more of their efforts on final reviews and perfecting content.

Payroll and finance

AI can help you automatically detect and prevent expense-related fraud, helping ensure you don’t overpay due to duplicate reimbursements, ghost employees or other financial irregularities. It can also reduce the workload on your finance team by automating expense categorization and streamlining audits, making financial data easier to access, review and validate.

Citizen services

To access services information, tribal citizens typically have to visit tribal government offices within set working hours. AI helps your community get easier access to the support they need by enhancing the websites and portals you may already be using.

Adding AI chatbots gives members 24/7 access to information and answers. They can also be used to review a member’s information and help them identify what services or assistance programs they may qualify for.

Future use cases

In addition to current use cases, there are more advanced AI applications tribes can explore:

• Predictive child welfare and case routing: AI can be used to predict the severity of certain cases, helping tribes make case routing as efficient as possible.
• Real-time language revitalization: Tribes can leverage AI to preserve language and even educate future generations.
• Tribal court case prediction: AI can help tribes review historical case records to support current cases.
• Housing waitlist and allocation: AI can help streamline administrative work for housing teams by automating waitlist management and supporting demand forecasting and planning.
• Tribal sovereign LLMs: Small, on-premise LLMs can help tribes leverage AI while keeping their data secure. They also let AI draw on tribal data for an experience that’s tailored to a specific tribe’s history and needs.

Managing AI risk

As much as AI promises transformation, it carries potential risk.

AI can be adopted securely. The key is to understand the risks and the strategies you can use to mitigate them.

Here are some common concerns and how you can implement effective AI risk management:

Losing control of your data

AI presents a unique threat to a tribe’s data: without the right controls in place, your data could be used to train external AI models.

In order to address this concern, it’s important to understand the tribal data protection available to you:

• When working with AI vendors or vendors for systems that include AI functionality, discuss inserting a “No training, no benchmarking and no synthetic data creation” clause.
• Many commercially available tools such as Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT, include privacy settings that will prevent your input or chats from being used to train models.
• You can create a sovereign, small LLM that’s trained specifically on your tribe’s data and exists on-premises.

AI disrespecting your culture, history or language

AI outputs are far from perfect, and tribes face the risk of generating content that is not only error-prone, but also culturally disrespectful.

It’s important to remember that all AI outputs should be reviewed by a person. Keeping humans in-the-loop to sign off on any content, especially content that’s related to culture or language, is a critical part of using AI safely.

Additionally, tribes can look at creating data vaults for their AI tools. With these vaults, you can establish procedures so that the only data the AI tool can reference is contained in the vault, helping mitigate the risk of AI referencing disrespectful materials.

Vendors holding citizen data hostage

If you leave your vendor, do you know what will happen to your data?

When establishing your vendor relationships and contracts, make sure you understand the terms. You can help mitigate data sovereignty risk with vendors by: 

• Leveraging a data escrow with a neutral third party: Data escrow creates a managed environment where other parties will need authorization to access data. It also provides a backup repository for critical information.
• Review your contract terms: Adding in terms such as a full data export within 30 days, even if you terminate for convenience, can give you greater confidence in your data protection. 

Staff may expose sensitive data

Tribes and their staff often manage critical, sensitive data, from casino revenue to members’ enrollment and health information. A major concern with AI is that anything staff members put into the model faces the risk of becoming public information or being used to train models.

In order to mitigate risk or staff using sensitive data, tribes should:

• Provide training and education: Mandatory training for staff helps them understand the concerns and risks associated with AI, your organization’s AI policies and procedures and how to use AI safely.
• Provide department-specific playbooks: Each staff member should have access to and training on their department-specific AI policy. To create your policy, you can refer to resources offered by Arizona State University and the Cherokee Nation AI policy.
• Pick the right pilot: As you incorporate AI and train staff, focus on high-pain, low-risk pilots, such as grant writing assistants or member-services chatbots. These projects add value while giving your staff time to adjust and learn how to use AI. They also give your tribe time to establish and test secure AI practices and policies.

It’s important to remind your staff that AI isn’t there to replace them; it’s there as a tool to augment their roles. Like any good tool, AI needs to be used in a way that’s safe so that it can make the biggest impact.

How Wipfli can help

AI offers powerful opportunities for tribes to enhance operations and better serve members — but success depends on the right strategy and safeguards. Contact our tribal services team to talk about how you can adopt technology in a secure, impactful way.

Explore our tribal services

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