The United States General Services Administration is going to work on a federal blockchain pilot project this summer, Federal News Radio reported.

The initiative is a part of GSA’s ongoing Emerging Citizen Technology program that aims to bring different agencies together to discuss, explore, and eventually adopt new artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies.

“We’ve started talking with agencies … [and] working with companies, [and] we’ve started just listening and going around and starting to identify … those business cases and those needs that the distributed ledger systems that blockchain provides and those technologies provide … can impact government,” Justin Herman, the lead for the emerging citizen technology program at GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, said in an interview with Federal News Radio.

Herman further said that while agencies have started exploring the technology, they have not started discussing their discoveries yet. According to him, rapid development pilots are the way forward for agencies to start exploring blockchain and other emerging technologies.

According to Federal News Radio, GSA is currently working with nearly 30 agencies to evaluate ways in which they can integrate their public data into available artificial intelligence personal assistants, including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. GSA is now encouraging these 30 agencies to use existing data to conduct short pilots on smart assistance technologies.

Herman pointed out that the short-term objective is to develop a “government-wide compliance framework”, which would help agencies implement their own programs in the future.

“These aren’t programs unto themselves,” he said of the agency pilots. “It’s just a month or two to be able to test something out, put together some proofs of concept that will then allow us to … identify … the privacy resources, the performance metrics [and] all those components that agencies need in order to responsibly adopt these emerging technologies.”

GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service and the State Department’s Office of Global Partnerships are going to hold a blockchain forum this summer. Herman said that the forum aims to discuss how and where it might be appropriate to engage with the blockchain industry.