When Gov. Maura Healey announced in February that Massachusetts would become the first state to deploy a ChatGPT-powered AI assistant across the entire executive branch, the news was framed around efficiency: 40,000 state employees getting a tool to help them work faster.

But the mechanics of how the tool will work are keyed into a discussion raging across labor and data privacy sectors, plus drawing the eyes of lawmakers. It’s also raising questions around what data is captured and how the program itself is trained.

For an AI assistant to be useful to a caseworker at the Department of Children and Families, or a benefits processor at MassHealth, or a clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, it needs access to the data those workers handle. Tax records. Medical histories. RMV files. Housing and rental information. Benefits documentation.

The Commonwealth holds some of the most sensitive personal information of its more than 7 million residents — and under the Healey administration’s three-year, roughly $4.3-million-a-year contract with OpenAI, all of that is now in the orbit of a private AI system.

Technology Secretary Jason Snyder talked with CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast to explain why the administration thinks that’s the right call.

“I think it starts with this idea that AI is here,” he said. “It’s not going away. There’s no technologies that come in and then disappear.” From the administration’s vantage point, he said, “what we’re looking at first and foremost is training everybody in [AI] use. It’s an educational focus. It’s this idea that the way that we really focus on building our workforce is through training our workforce in AI.”

The fiscal logic is straightforward. State agencies are stretched thin while demand for services keeps climbing, and the administration sees AI as a way to close that gap without adding headcount. The various agencies that deal with regulated data would have custom, closed workspaces dedicated to their specific needs, according to Snyder.

The administration has been building toward this for a while.