CDC releases AI strategy, guidance with eye toward ‘agentic’ uses

Source Domain: fedscoop.com

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a strategy and guidance for use of artificial intelligence on Thursday, setting a direction for the agency’s own work and providing resources for public health officials across the country.

Those documents point to a desire to promote adoption of the technology, empower the workforce to use it, and ensure the tools are governed properly. But, more uniquely, the publications encourage the use of “agentic” or “deep research” AI uses — those that can autonomously carry out specific tasks — which CDC is already tapping into.

Almost 10% of CDC’s roughly 100 AI use cases were agentic tools in 2025, according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ recently reported AI use case inventory. Its share of agentic uses makes up roughly a third of such deployments across the department.

As a result, the CDC’s new strategy includes specific language to leverage that technology to support public health, strengthen research and data management, and improve access to data. And simultaneously, the agency released specific guidance for state, tribal, local and territorial (STLT) public health authorities on the use of AI agents for research based on experiences from its own exploration.

“One of the number one asks that we get from our partners is guidance around this technology,” Travis Hoppe, the CDC’s acting chief AI officer, told FedScoop. The AI inventory showed where the agency was using the technology, and the new materials followed through with more information, he said.

The promise of agentic tools for agencies like CDC is that they can go beyond uses like email summarization and prescriptive tasks to move things forward, Hoppe said. For example, the CDC is already using a deep research tool to speed up the process of reviewing literature, data, policy and other sources to inform decision-making.

A common task for CDC staff is doing a three- to…

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