Nevada’s employment agency is preparing to expand its use of artificial intelligence into unemployment benefits appeals, a step that state officials say will shorten the time between an appeal hearing and a written decision. The Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, or DETR, has been testing a Google-run AI tool for months and plans to use it in the coming weeks for cases involving unemployment benefit decisions.
Under Nevada’s current process, people who appeal an unemployment benefits decision get a hearing where both sides present evidence and testimony. A state employee serving as a referee then issues a written decision within 30 days. With the new approach, DETR says the AI tool would review the information from the appeals hearing—including documents—and check relevant Nevada laws and regulations, then produce a ruling that still must be signed off by the referee.
DETR’s director, Christopher Sewell, emphasized that the system is not intended to replace human oversight. In an interview with The Nevada Independent, Sewell said: “AI is a great tool — but that’s what it is. It’s a tool.” He added, “We have to have human review with everything that we do.” Officials said two state workers will be involved in the process, and that the AI’s output will require human verification before it can become the final decision.
Several lawmakers in Nevada’s Legislature nonetheless raised concerns as the rollout moved forward. State Sen. Dina Neal, who sponsored a bill last year that would have dramatically increased state oversight of AI, questioned how the state handles consent and transparency when appeal materials flow through an AI-driven process. Neal said in an interview: “When you start to contract with an AI company, where does the Nevada citizen fit inside of that relationship?” She continued, “Because you’re contracting a Nevada citizen’s rights without their consent, without their knowledge. And that is backwards.”
Critics also fault the state’s argument for efficiency. DETR said the tool could issue a ruling in five minutes, compared with a process without AI that can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours depending on the complexity of the case. But Sen. Skip Daly, a vocal critic of the state’s AI use, said the potential time savings may not materialize in practice if human review still adds time. Daly said in an interview: “I don’t think there should be a reliance on this, and this is where it starts,” adding, “You get used to it, and then you get comfortable with it.”
DETR said it had delayed the project after accuracy issues slowed the rollout. The agency had eyed using the Google tool since summer 2024, and the contract’s total price is $2.6 million, with about $1.1 million spent so far. DETR had also planned to use AI for invoicing, but the agency said that project is not moving forward after determining it was not meeting the “promised benefits and expectation,” according to a spokesperson.
Officials have also pointed to the timing of the change as the underlying context. DETR’s AI expansion comes after the agency suffered a massive backlog of unemployment appeals during the pandemic, a backlog officials said has since subsided. Sewell said that teaching the AI to make accurate rulings “is taking a lot longer than we thought,” and the agency said it tested the tool using older appeals to ensure it could reach the right decisions.
Sewell said two earlier problems—an incorrect Nevada law reference and incomplete gathering of information from appeals documents—had been fixed. DETR officials said the contract with Google, approved in August 2024, required that the system have a 90% success rate, meaning the state expected decisions to be correct nine times out of 10. Sewell said the state wants a true accuracy rate that is higher.
The agency said it has put security measures in place for the deployment. DETR said the platform would ensure data does not leave the continental U.S., that the state will have control over encryption keys, and that it is in compliance with Nevada laws on IT and personal information security. After reviewing contract and security protocol documents, Junggab Son, a computer science professor at UNLV whose research includes AI algorithm vulnerabilities and privacy protection, told The Nevada Independent that he believes the Google platform itself is secure but raised concerns about how the AI tool will be deployed. Son said human reviews could lead people to place too much trust in the AI’s work and warned about potential bias and hallucinations, saying: “These kinds of things, maybe they need to address a little bit more.”
A statewide framework for AI use also exists. Nevada’s Governor’s Technology Office published a 2024 policy on agency AI use that, according to Michael Hanna-Butros Meyering, the office’s chief communication and policy officer, is designed to set statewide standards rather than govern day-to-day operations. Meyering said the policy prohibits agency-level AI policies from being more lenient than the statewide one, and it bars the use of AI to create discriminatory content or to use personal data without anonymization. Meyering also said the Governor’s Technology Office chairs a group of agency IT officials that meets to discuss AI-related projects and problems and plans to increase its efforts amid AI’s rapid growth.
Labor and other critics also pushed for limits on AI in benefits determinations. In a statement, AFSCME Local 4041, which represents state workers, said “AI should never be used to replace public service workers’ judgment, expertise, experience and skills,” adding that “AI tools often hallucinate and use biased data that can produce biased results.” The union said public programs that evaluate and make decisions about benefits eligibility “must be held to the highest standards for responsible AI use.”
As Nevada moves toward deploying the unemployment appeals tool, lawmakers said additional oversight may be on the way. Neal said she is planning to bring back an AI oversight bill during next year’s legislative session, saying: “It’s going to happen.”