How AI Enhances FOIA Team Productivity When Resources Are Tight

Excelling in the Era of Lean Government

FOIA requests are increasing in complexity and volume. Meanwhile, open records professionals — who already face staff shortages and budgetary limitations — must adhere to demands from DOGE’s government-wide crackdown on inefficiency. 

Fortunately, AI technology can automate time-consuming tasks and expedite the fulfillment of FOIA requests with reduced manual effort, greater efficiency, and fewer human errors.

Most FOIA Officers Are Optimistic About AI-Powered Software

In a recent survey, 80% of FOIA officers said that reducing their request backlogs is their top priority, but they face too many requests and not enough resources to process them in a timely fashion. Respondents also saw opportunities for AI to help improve FOIA workflows:

FOIAXpress® AI Assistant Empowers Your People (Without Replacing Them)

FOIAXpress unites processes and tasks for request handling, record retrieval, redaction, and compliance onto a single case management platform. The AI Assistant accelerates the review and redaction phases of the FOIA process in a way that keeps your team in total control.

Automatic Redaction

The AI Assistant relies on historical data and criteria established by your team to automatically redact a file loaded into FOIAXpress.

Transparent Redaction Summaries

Once the automated redaction is finished, the AI Assistant provides a detailed summary of each redaction it performed.

Human Review

A FOIA officer can accept or reject any of the AI Assistant’s redactions. In a single pass, they can flag or delete unwanted redactions, and take additional actions before completing the request.

How the FOIAXpress AI Assistant Works and Improves Over Time

Pattern Recognition

Your team can create and customize templates to automate the redaction of specific elements within a document, including PII, subject-specific data such as credit card numbers, and more. They can also apply multiple templates to a single document when reviewing the AI Assistant’s work.

Automated Name Entity Recognition

Through natural language processing (NLP), the AI Assistant automatically recognizes names of people, locations, organizations, currencies, dates, times, and other potentially sensitive information.

Harness the Power of AI to Overcome Your High Backlogs

Enhance the efficiency of FOIA redaction with an AI tool that automates tasks without eliminating human oversight. 

• Reduce backlogs
• Avoid unfavorable press and costly litigation
• Decrease staff burnout and spending