{"id":124960,"date":"2026-07-30T22:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T22:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/124960\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T22:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T22:49:08","slug":"federal-it-leaders-to-agencies-collaborate-use-ai-to-rethink-workflows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/124960\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal IT leaders to agencies: collaborate, use AI to rethink workflows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence must be integrated into reengineered processes for federal employees, tech leaders from across the government and industry said at the Federal Emerging Technology Showcase on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Hosted by the General Services Administration at the Interior Department, over 1,400 online and a few dozen in-person attendees heard how different agencies are encouraging AI adoption and what tech leaders want to see in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal is not just to automate for the sake of automation, but rather to really question longstanding ways of doing things and really challenge ourselves with whether or not that should be eliminated or, at a minimum, streamlined and optimized,\u201d said Chris Grigsby, acting director of GSA\u2019s Office of Digital Finance.<\/p>\n

Speakers ranging from the outgoing<\/a> federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, acting Technology Modernization Fund Director Jessie Posilkin and Felipe Millon, OpenAI\u2019s head of government go to market, spoke on cross-governmental collaboration, access to the right tools and how to practice using AI to rethink how employees work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must move together as one federal enterprise,\u201d Barbaccia said. \u201cWe can\u2019t be using different models and different harnesses and different orchestrations to solve the same problems that are fungible across all the agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

But some of the AI barriers are not just between agencies, but within them.<\/p>\n

Adam Starr, the Office of Personnel Management\u2019s CIO, said the government\u2019s human capital agency asks employees what their barriers to AI adoption are, and gives bonuses to workers who innovate with AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Starr said OPM also started an \u201cAI Catalyst Program, where I\u2019ve repurposed some of my top engineers to go sit with different businesses on rethinking their work around technology, and maybe it\u2019s a connection to a new data source, but trying to drive down those barriers to tech adoption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do we enable the people on our teams, the really smart federal employees, to rethink their work?\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it has to be a combination of top down and bottom up. \u2026 It requires investment in rethinking that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Posilkin said it\u2019s not just about whether the tools exist, but if government employees have access to them. Barbaccia said FedRAMP is no longer a point-in-time certification; it is ongoing.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s Million gave the GSA a \u201cton of credit\u201d for the FedRAMP 20x program, which the agency utilized to allow \u201cnew technology to come in faster.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other agencies are also considering how to quicken the pace of tech adoption. The Department of Veterans Affairs on Wednesday issued a memo, obtained by FedScoop,<\/a> that said existing FedRAMP certification is not required for contractors to win bids. FedRAMP Director Pete Waterman said in a LinkedIn post<\/a> Thursday that he \u201cloved\u201d the memo and will \u201cbring a version of it to the FedRAMP Board and recommend we share it with other agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

No matter how AI gets authorized for use, the bottom line, Million said, is that federal employees must use AI to understand it. OpenAI\u2019s $1 OneGov deal<\/a>, as well as Google\u2019s $0.47 deal<\/a>, expire in the coming months.<\/p>\n

TMF, meanwhile, stands ready to help agencies as they use AI to speed up processes, Posilkin said. Posilkin has put out a call for proposals for more AI projects<\/a> as TMF\u2019s funding runs out, awaiting congressional reauthorization.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about novel technology; it is about going back to the humans,\u201d Posilkin said. \u201cI think often user-centered design gets talked about as this sort of nice-to-have, woo-woo thing in the corner, instead of actually it can drastically change what your architecture needs are and what your infrastructure costs are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jonathan Entwistle, ecosystem chief technology officer for IBM, predicted that the next few years will bring in a new phase of AI and quantum computing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 2024 was all about models and \u201825 was kind of, \u2018let\u2019s go build agents,\u2019 I think what we\u2019re going to start to see at the end of \u201826 into \u201827 is software and engines that create more context,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"K.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWritten by K. Sophie Will
\n\t\t\tK. Sophie Will is a reporter at FedScoop. Previously, she was an investigative data reporter at Bloomberg Industry Group. An award-winning journalist and Utah native, she graduated from Boston University and formerly worked with CQ Roll Call, the Utah Investigative Journalism Project, the Deseret News, USA Today, Reuters, HuffPost, WGBH, and more. Reach her on Signal at ksophiewill.66 or by phone at 617-888-0900.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence must be integrated into reengineered processes for federal employees, tech leaders from across the government and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[62822,24,25,111,34537,62829,8550,59853,62830,28203,132,1430,7341,15945,62831,39157,62832,15947,157,59856,39158,270],"class_list":["post-124960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-adam-starr","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-chief-information-officer","tag-chris-grigsby","tag-fedramp","tag-fedramp-20x","tag-felipe-millon","tag-general-services-administration-gsa","tag-google","tag-google-gemini","tag-government-it-news","tag-greg-barbaccia","tag-interior-department","tag-jessie-posilkin","tag-jonathan-entwistle","tag-office-of-personnel-management-opm","tag-openai","tag-pete-waterman","tag-technology-modernization-fund","tag-veterans-affairs-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}