Agentic RAG Chatbot

Overview

Development stage

In development or acquisitionSource: a) Pre-deployment – The use case is in a development or acquisition status.

High-impact designation

Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact

Impact justification

Not reported

Start date

Not reported

Withheld from public reporting

NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area

Health and Medical

Operational functions

Chatbot or virtual assistant, Search and knowledge retrieval, Public-facing customer service Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

The creation of accurate, detailed, and factually-grounded draft responses to public inquiries takes a large amount of time and could benefit from assistance from LLMs. Because of how complex the responses to the inquiries can be, LLMs alone did not perform well enough to be useful in production, so we decided to build a more advanced chatbot that uses a small team of agents to refine the inquiries, decide what source data to use for grounding, and generate higher-quality draft responses to the inquiries that staff can use as a starting place for writing their replies.

Expected benefits

Time savings, especially when programs are overwhelmed by acute increases in the volume of inquiries they receive after publishing a new guideline or regulation is the primary expected benefit.

System outputs

Draft responses to an inquiry to serve as a base for staff. The inquiry draft will follow all CDC public health research, data, and recommendations based on the best science currently available. Inquiry responses will go through a separate agency review process prior to release.

Technology

AI classification

Agentic AISource: Agentic AI: AI systems that perform tasks or make decisions autonomously with minimal human intervention.

System name(s)

Not reported

Custom-developed code

Not reported

Public source code

Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built

Not reported

Vendor (as reported)

Not reported

Vendors (standardized)

None on the standard list

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII

Not reported

Privacy Impact Assessment

Not reported

Authorization to Operate

Not reported

Demographic features

Not reported

Training and evaluation data

Not reported

Federal Data Catalog

Not reported

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported